SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 29, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Updated: IAC Ready To Drop Ask.com Search Technology & Partner With Google?
IAC: Ready To Bail On Ask? from Silicon Valley Insider reports an insider tip that IAC may sell off or abandon their search technology and outsource it to Google. Here is the tip: There is indeed a big shakeup coming. A new Ask. Some think a reduction in workforce is likely. There are no sacred […]
Are You An Agency SEM Pro? Take SEMPO’s Salary Survey
SEMPO is undertaking a salary survey of agency search engine marketing professionals, similar to its in-house SEM salary survey that we reported on in January. If you’re an agency SEM pro, SEMPO would like to hear from you, whether you’re a SEMPO member or not. To qualify for the survey, you must: Work at an […]
Search In Pictures: SMX Bowl, Google Jeans, Bart’s Chalk Board
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
YouTube To Add Live Video This Year
Steve Chen: YouTube to Add Live Video from NewTeeVee reports that YouTube’s founder said they will be adding live video support this year. Videoblogger Sarah Meyers asked Chen about video blogging, in which he said: 2008. We’ll do it this year. Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 28, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
SMX West Day Three Coverage
SMX day three, the final day, is now complete. I am sitting in the airport for the next few hours, so I thought I’d push out this last recap. Here is all the coverage I found on day three:
Google Webmaster Tools: Now On Your iGoogle Homepage
Google’s Webmaster Central is giving you a new way to access the diagnostics and stats for your sites. Rather than log into your Webmaster Tools account, you can add the Webmaster Tools gadget to your iGoogle page and access information from there. You can choose what components to display on your iGoogle page. Below are […]
Local Business Listings: Dealing with Negative Reviews
Last month, I wrote about Why Local Businesses Should Be Like the Jerk, which examined the basics associated with businesses being listed in local listings and results. Now I want to take a look at the logical next consideration: How can businesses respond when they receive less-than-favorable reviews?
Google Sites Launches: Replaces Jotspot With Team Sharing Software
Google launched Google Sites, basically a relaunch of Jotspot but with many more features. In short, this new software allows teams to share much like you could with Microsoft’s SharePoint. Google sites offers users five templates, as TechCrunch explains:
Google Health Formally Announced This Morning
Google Health has been an open secret for more than a year. Last week the company announced a pilot program with the Cleveland Clinic as a prelude to a formal announcement of the service. That formal announcement came this morning at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference in Florida, in a keynote from […]
Does Your Site Have Sex Appeal?
The secret’s out: men and women are different—in person and online. Gender differences matter in web design, content, and marketing. It takes more than a girlish color scheme and soft focus photos of smiling children to draw women to your site and earn their loyalty. Color and design matter, but so do content, safety, and […]
Video Search Engine Optimization: Catering To The Masses
Video is easier to digest than ever before. High speed wired and wi-fi services, iPhones, and other video-enabled mobile devices are helping hungry users scarf down a smorgasbord of video treats. And publishers are going back to the kitchen to serve up more and more. How do publishers scale their operations to meet this seemingly […]
Is Your Website Copy Crystal Clear?
Pretend you don’t know anything about what your company offers and you stumbled onto it somehow. Can you tell immediately what it’s all about? Can the search engines? Do this exercise with each inner page of the site as well. Is what each page has to offer truly crystal clear? Or does your website presume […]
Sitemaps.org Update: You Can Now Store Your XML Sitemap Files Anywhere!
The major search engines have announced an update to the sitemaps.org protocol which enables site owners to store their XML Sitemap files in any location — even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap. This will be a welcome change for those who manage multiple domains and would like to keep […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 27, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
SMX West Day Two Coverage
Day two is pretty much over now. We still have the Google Grove later, but the sessions are now complete. Here is coverage of the conference, picking up from where we left off last night.
Google Takes Top Prize At SMX Search Bowl
Last night was the first ever SMX Search Bowl. Basically, the Search Engine Land team created fifty questions that were asked to the various teams. The teams consisted of two players from Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Live Search, and the SEM All Star team. Danny displayed the questions on the screen and the first team to […]
Yahoo’s Apex Preview: An Ambitious, Unified Ad Platform
At the IAB conference in Phoenix on Monday, Yahoo President Sue Decker made some tantalizing allusions to a new ad platform called “Apex.” According to the NY Times, this stands for “advertiser publisher exchange.”
Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer: “Google Owes Its Business To Us”
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium, Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer Craig Mundie made the perhaps technically correct but strange remark that Google’s business was essentially derivative of Microsoft’s success. “If we didn’t succeed at the PC, they wouldn’t have a business,” Mundie is quoted as saying. Yet Microsoft didn’t invent the PC, nor […]
EFF Sues DOJ Over Googler For Correspondence With Horvath
Group Sues Justice for Google Contacts from Washington Post reports that the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit against a former Googler. The EFF want to know what was said between Google and Jane Horvath, a former US Justice Department privacy lawyer who now works for Google. The suit was filed in U. S. District Court […]
Lessons Learned As An In-House SEO Consultant
Jessica Bowman’s article in the Winter issue of Search Marketing Standard, “Bringing SEO In-House,” defines the In-House SEO Life Cycle as: Courtship, Honeymoon, Reality, and Synergy phases. In the courtship phase you recruit the best in-house SEO possible. When the honeymoon is over, reality sets in. That’s when you have a chance to develop synergy. […]
In-Depth With EveryZing Chief Revenue Officer Stephen Baker
EveryZing, the search solutions provider well-known for offering speech-recognizable, time-coded, linkable transcripts for video and audio content in their multimedia search engine, today announced it has launched ezSEO AND ezSEARCH, two products designed to improve the findability of audio and video content by both web search engines and content provider site search services. ezSEO is a […]
Leveraging Search To Meet B2B Challenges
B-to-B marketers have unique challenges to overcome—everything from the lengthy sales cycle, to tracking gaps from leads to sales, to heavy competition on top terms. But the good news is that search engine marketing helps marketers meet these challenges head-on. The bad news is that this list of challenges is far from comprehensive. In fact, […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 26, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
SMX West Day One Coverage
The sessions for the first day of Search Marketing Expo West is now complete. I am about to head into the Search Bowl Tailgating and SMX Search Bowl but I’ll post that coverage tomorrow, if any. Here are the blog posts and news items I found throughout the web for today’s conference:
Minimum Bids In Yahoo About To Change
Yahoo announced that the minimum bid of $0.10 within the search network will no longer be a true minimum bid. Yahoo is changing it so that the minimum bids can be lower or higher than $0.10. This does not impact the content network. What makes a minimum bid go higher or lower? Two factors: (1) […]
How Depending on Quality Content Can Actually Cost You Links
“Content is king.” If you’re like me, you’ve heard that phrase more times than you can count. And for the most part, it’s true. Truly unique content can make or break your link development campaign. If you have it, you’ll find attracting quality links takes minimal effort for exceptional results. Without it, you’ll find link […]
From SEO To Social Media: Content Is Still King
There was a time in social media, just as in search engine optimization (SEO), when everything was only about getting to the front page. Little attention was paid to what happened after you got there, and for a while it seemed as if you could do it in your sleep. Over the last year, social […]
Despite Takeover Turmoil, Yahoo Not Rolling Over & Playing Dead
A curious thing is happening: Yahoo seems to be executing in the midst of the chaos of uncertainty surrounding its future. Speaking at an IAB event yesterday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang
Google AdWords Launches Limited Beta Test Named “Automatic Matching”
Dan Thies reported that some Google AdWords advertisers are beta testing a new AdWords feature named “Automatic Matching.” Automatic Matching is a way for Google to help the advertiser utilize their full budget towards keywords that they may have not been targeting. If they have used only 50% of their ad budget, Google can detect […]
Google Updates AdSense Terms & Conditions
AdSense publishers, the next time you login to your AdSense console you will likely have to agree to new terms and conditions. The Inside AdSense blog announced that Google has updated their AdSense terms and conditions to include better verbiage for new products and features, as well as an update to their privacy requirements. The […]
Google Talk / Gmail Adds Live Chat & Invisible Mode Features
Google Talk has announced a couple new features, including Google Talk Chatback and invisible mode. The first feature is similar to a live chat box that you can add to any web page and chat with anyone via your Google Talk or Gmail account. Google calls the feature “chatback,” and it allows anyone, even without […]
Google Joins “Unity” Undersea Cable Consortium For More Transpacific Bandwidth
Google has joined a consortium of Asian companies, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet, and SingTel, to build an undersea transpacific fiber optic cable that will provide much greater bandwidth capacity between the United States and Japan. According to the press release, the cost of the new “Unity” cable effort will be $300 million. […]
Search Illustrated: How To Use Social Media Sites
As SEOs, we know that a little creative thinking goes a long way in using social media sites to promote a business. In one way or another, these collaborative communities provide endless opportunities for viral and word-of-mouth marketing. This week’s infographic provides a handy snapshot of the top social media sites, what purpose they were […]
Yahoo Buzz Launches: Votes, Searches, & Emails Used To Rank News
As expected, Yahoo Buzz has now launched — a site where "buzz-worthy" news articles are highlighted based on user votes, searching activity, and email sharing. Hot stories on Buzz may also get featured on the Yahoo home page, an added incentive to get publishers considering the program.
Yahoo To Announce “Search Monkey” Enhanced, Annotated Results At SMX West
Today, at the inaugural Search Marketing Expo West conference, Yahoo plans to unveil a project code-named “Search Monkey,” a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific web sites. The new enhancements differ from Yahoo’s “Shortcuts” that sometimes appear at the top of search result […]
Andy Beal Launches Trackur For Monitoring Online Reputation
When monitoring what people are saying about you and your brand online, you have two main choices. You can use Google Alerts as well as search a variety of social media and social networking sites manually, or you can pay a reputation management firm to do expensive monitoring for you. Now you have a third […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 25, 2008
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
SEMPO Announces New 2008 Board of Directors
SEMPO has announced the 2008 Board of Directors that will take office on March 12, 2008. The board of directors includes: