Apple

Search Biz: Diller Keeps IAC Control; Googlers To Facebook; Google Earnings Downgraded & More

IAC stays in Barry Diller’s control. US government agencies look to Google’s search hardware to find information. Google’s hotel-industrial complex that’s coming to Mountain View. Those darn declining paid clicks — will they hurt Google’s bottom line? Yahoo breaks out golden handcuffs to retain employees, while Google loses another one to Facebook. And more in […]

Apple

Will You Be Sued Over Your Ad Copy Usage?

Storus Corp just successfully sued another advertiser for use of a trademarked term in the ad copy. This is the first time that I have seen a company sue another advertiser directly without relying on Google as the intermediary for filing trademark exceptions. As PPC advertisers, this affects us dramatically.

PPC

Yahoo Takes A “Shine” To Women 25 To 54

Perhaps the perfection of Yahoo’s vertical strategy is its new blog-inspired site Shine. It’s a broad mix of content from publisher partners such as Hearst Communications, Rodale, and Condé Nast. It also aggregates and links to third party content and is encouraging users to blog on the site. Unlike Yahoo content-specific sites like Food, Shine […]

Content

SEO Company, Fathom Online, Acquired By Geary Interactive

Geary Interactive has announced acquiring Fathom Online, an SEO company. Fathom was formed in 2002 and is based in San Francisco. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Geary is a full service digital marketing agency based in San Diego. Some of Fathom’s employees are now working out of the San Diego office.

Local

Local Store And Inventory Data Poised To Transform “Online Shopping”

The neglected part of the local story is about products. Often local search is discussed exclusively in terms of finding service businesses or small businesses in one’s own area. But an equally important, if less obvious, part of the “local search” phenomenon is shopping in the more traditional sense. I’ve written previous Locals Only columns […]

Advertising

In The Trenches, March 28, 2008

In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. Today: News from the search engines, today’s in-depth look, “What You Don’t Know About Quality Scores May Kill You,” and this week’s free tips and tools.

SEO

In The Trenches: New Column From Search Engine Land

Our newest Search Engine Land column, In The Trenches, launches today. In The Trenches is a weekly spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. In today’s debut article, Josh Dreller comments on news from the search engines, offers an […]

Local

Google Adds 13 Metro Areas To Street Views, Plus New API Support

The Google LatLong Blog announced the expansion of street views to Google Maps. Google added 13 new metropolitan areas and Yosemite National Park. The 13 metro areas include Albuquerque, NM, Anchorage, AK, Austin, TX, Cleveland, OH, Fairbanks, AK, Little Rock, AR, Madison, WI, Nashville, TN, Rockford, IL, Richmond, VA, Spokane, WA, St. Petersburg, FL, and […]

Content

Drilling Into Google’s Decline In Paid Clicks

More doom and gloom on the paid search side for Google. comScore is once again reporting a drop in sponsored clicks, something that also happened last month. After last month’s fallout, comScore did a lot of further analysis shared at the Searchscape panel at our SMX West conference and online to ease concerns that it […]

Google

Google Offers Robots.txt Generator

Google’s rolled out a new tool at Google Webmaster Central, a robots.txt generator. It’s designed to allow site owners to easily create a robots.txt file, one of the two main ways (along with the meta robots tag) to prevent search engines from indexing content. Robots.txt generators aren’t new. You can find many of them out […]

SEO

Privacy Policies And Search Engines

A few weeks back, I started wondering about whether or not search engines might care whether or not a web site had a privacy policy. Is the content of a page less relevant or more relevant if there’s a link on it to information about how any data collected about visitors might be used? Probably […]

Google

Earth Hour: Google Shuts Out The Lights In Israel

Google Israel turned out the lights and flipped their white background color to black for שעת כדור הארץ (aka Earth Hour). What is ironic is that we reported in the past that Google argued that black uses more energy that white. (Although they participated in Lights Out San Francisco last October as a symbolic turning […]

Content

YouTube Insight: View Your YouTube Video Statistics

The YouTube Blog and Google Blog announced YouTube Insight, YouTube’s new video statistics area. In short, additional statistics are now available to users who upload videos to YouTube. You can get stats on the number of views per day your video received, where those viewers are in the world, and how popular your video is […]

PPC

We Don’t Need SEO Standards!

Last month I attended the SMX West session in Santa Clara entitled Is it Time for Search Marketing Standards? It was an interesting session, but I wasn’t really sure where I stood on the issue at the time. Now that I’ve had a few weeks to think about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that […]

Bing

Report: Microsoft To Up Bid For Yahoo To $34 Per Share

Silicon Alley Insider reacts to Wall Street Analyst Mark Mahaney’s note that he anticipates Microsoft will raise its bid for Yahoo from $31 to $34 dollars per share. Barring an 11th hour alternative for Yahoo, this should move toward Yahoo’s public position that the original Microsoft bid undervalued the company. It also should please Yahoo’s […]

Google Ads

Google AdWords Video Ads Now Live & In the Wild

A few minutes ago, I posted screen captures of Google’s new video ads in the real, live, and wild search results. These were announced back in February but only now appear to have really gone live. Searches that triggered this result for me included cell phone or smart phones or phones. It seems like BlackBerry […]

SEO

Is Hiding Content With “Display: None” Legitimate SEO?

If you’re doing SEO on a site with thousands or tens of thousands of pages, it’s likely you’re working with some sort of content management system (CMS). However, CMS systems frequently cause problems with search engines. The great majority of the time these problems arise through ignorance on part of the CMS software developers. Basically, […]

Content

B2B Marketing Priorities 2008

Let’s face it, life is about priorities. There’s never enough time, money, or resources for everything. Consequently, we must prioritize. Doing so forces us to choose between what we want and what we actually need. And marketers are anything but exempt from such choices. When times are good—and we have a bit more money to […]

Content

Public Relations: The Other Important PR In Link Development

Link development, before search engines polluted the process into a currency for search engine rankings, was all about promotion. Links were simply a natural side effect of promoting your website. And one of the most tried and true methods of promotion is PR (as in Public Relations, not Pagerank). “The American Heritage Dictionary defines PR […]

SEO

OpenSocial Becomes More Open, Facebook Says No; AOL Flamed By Mag; Court Rules Against Clicking Minors

The big news today comes from a trio of major Internet brands. Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace joined forces to announce that OpenSocial, the social networking platform alternative to Facebook’s platform, is going to become a non-profit foundation. As such, it will have a completely separate management and identity from Google and the others […]

Paid social

Social Media Optimization: Submit it, But Don’t Forget It

When putting together a social media campaign, you should consider many different things before you actually submit your content. You need to think about creating good social media accounts, quality content, and which social media site to submit to. Finally you get to the point where you can submit your content and take a breather… […]

Google

Google Webmaster Central To Host Live Chat Event On Friday

Adam Lasnik announced the Google Webmaster Central team will be hosting a free live chat event this Friday. The live chat session will enable webmasters to call in and ask questions to Google, while watching Google Webmaster Central members respond to their questions in real time. The live chat session is taking place this Friday, […]

Local

Change Your Address In The Google Plusbox In 5 Simple Steps

Google’s enhanced listings for local search results are called the “PlusBox” because clicking the plus sign opens an inline box with additional information about a business. Over the past several weeks I’ve written about the problem of erroneous address information appearing in the Google PlusBox (here and here), and recently Bill Slawski covered the issue […]

Bing

Is Microhoo A Done Deal?

height=”100″ hspace=”5″ vspace=”3″ width=”100″> Lately, a merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft is looking more and more probable. Not only have reports been flying around that Yahoo! and Microsoft are in negotiations, but Yahoo!’s SEC filing last week (Tuesday March 18 2008) has added significantly more fuel to the merger fire.

Local

I Go Buy With A Little Help From My Friends

My family was recently in Boulder, CO—a place we had hitherto not been. Nice town, but where to go? We spent most of our time at The Spot rock climbing gym because our kids were competing in the bouldering national championships. After a day of intense heart-stopping competition, with thrills and spills set against a […]

Content

Court: Use Of Trademark In AdWords Copy Is An Infringement

Eric Goldman commented on a case between one advertiser using another advertiser’s trademark in Google AdWords. The court has made a decision (PDF), ruling for the plaintiff, Storus, who sued Aroa for using their trademark in the AdWords title text. Eric Goldman said this is one of the first times we have seen the plaintiff […]

Google Ads

Google AdWords Officially Launches Demographic Bidding? Maybe Not

On Friday, Google announced they launched demographic bidding to every advertiser in the AdWords program. In short, demographic bidding allows advertisers to show their ads to specific age groups and genders. They did a beta launch of this earlier this year, where they dropped using comScore data for their own. The problem is, I, as […]

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