SEO

Yahoo Search June 2008 Index Update

Yahoo has warned us of an up and coming Yahoo Search index update. Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search said Yahoo will “be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon.” The last Yahoo update was just […]

LinkedIn

Search Biz: Yahoo Morale OK, Musical Chairs At Google, Microsoft, Marc Andreessen Joins Facebook Board, & Tech Giants Fight “Patent Trolls”

Lots of action for SearchBiz today; let’s start with Yahoo. Fortune reprints a purported Yahoo employee email that is very upbeat and flies in the face of the gloom and doom analysis going on in the blogs. Meanwhile, TechCrunch reports on another executive loss at the company, while Carl “proxy fight” Icahn uses his blog […]

PPC

Yahoo Officially Discontinued The Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool

I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool no longer takes you to the tool; instead, it redirects you to the Yahoo Search Marketing landing page. I emailed Yahoo for a statement, and they have confirmed that they have decommissioned the tool. There are tools you can use within the […]

Google

Google Blocks Anti-Obama Blogs Flagged Incorrectly As Spam

My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site — but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren’t being abused — especially given how […]

Google

Matt Cutts On SEO Tips & Fighting Spam

Google’s Matt Cutts has recently provided some advice on SEO and explained how Google combats spam. Matt recently was interviewed by Jefferson Graham of USA Today. The article was named Google’s Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website. The article covers five topics of SEO: keyword phrases, title tags, links, blogs, and Google Webmaster […]

Apple

Google Pushing Into TV, Original Content Distribution

One could liken Google to a house that keeps expanding, with new room additions every few months. Google’s house is already the largest on the block and it seems to keep getting bigger. Two related moves represent further expansion. The first is the announcement last week of the Google Media Server, which conveys content from […]

PPC

Don’t Let Machines Write Your Keyword Lists

As anyone who has seen the Terminator or Matrix movies can attest, if machines rule the world humans are in deep trouble. Similarly, if you allow machines to control the PPC keyword creation process you are guaranteed to both leave opportunity on the table and flush money down the toilet. The reason is simple: language […]

Apple

Google Searchers Love The iPhone

comScore released statistics that showed the Google searcher is practically in love with the Apple iPhone. In fact, they found that 1.3 million searchers conducted 6.9 million searches for iPhone-related search terms in April 2008 alone. Of those 6.9 million searches, 88.4 percent came from Google, which is 33 percent higher than Google’s market share […]

Content

Human Hardware: The Paradox Of Choice

In the last few years, there have been two best selling books published that seem diametrically and philosophically opposed: The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz and The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Both explore the explosion of choice that we have in our modern world and how we might be equipped to navigate through […]

Search features

Visual Search The Future? Spare Me The Eye Candy

About two years ago, I wrote an article called Why Search Sucks & You Won’t Fix It The Way You Think. In it, I explained various ways people have tried to make search "visual" and why those have largely failed. That’s mainly because "list view" or "10 blue links" still works for lots of search […]

PPC

Online Video Ads: What Small Business Advertisers Need To Watch For

According to comScore, U.S. Internet users watched 11.5 billion online videos in March, 2008. The average viewer watched nearly three hours of video online. These statistics make video an attractive means for advertisers to reach their audience, and in turn, a potential windfall for online video hosts such as YouTube and Google. So far, however, […]

SEO

So, You Think You’re A Search Engine Optimization Expert?

A few years ago, I wrote a three-part article series about the different levels of SEO skills: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I placed copywriters at the beginner level, information architects and interface designers at the intermediate level, and web developers and programmers at the advanced level. At the time, I was pretty confident at the […]

Google

Google Finds A CFO From “Old Media”

Google has finally filled the CFO spot being vacated by George Reyes, the outgoing CFO who has been with the company since roughly 2002 (pre-IPO). The new CFO (and SVP) is Patrick Pichette, who was President of Operations at Bell Canada.

PPC

Search Marketing Meets Congress: Now In Video

Rob Snell, likely the first search marketer to testify before the US Congress, has done his duty. He emailed me, “We ran over the allotted time by 15 minutes or so, but they let us keep talking.” So I guess Congress likes SEM, they really like it. Below, you can watch a video of his […]

Content

Keeping Visitors Engaged With Site Search

B2B sites tend to be more difficult for visitors to find what they’re looking for. Perhaps it’s because things don’t always fit neatly into more intuitive consumer categories. Perhaps it’s because B2B sites are often laden with so much diverse information. While site owners can engineer enhanced usability, better optimize and structure content, or create […]

Apple

Everything You Wanted To Know About Google’s Android

Well, sort of. If you’re a developer you can get that information on the Android site. But if you’re interested in the history of Android, how much Google may have paid for the platform, and its hypothetical outlook, you can read this long Wired article. (You can also read my short riff on it in […]

Google

Google Posts Official Webmaster Help Group Chat Recordings, Transcript, & Presentations

Google has posted the official blog post summarizing last week’s live chat event. Yes, we did post the unofficial version on Thursday night, but now we have the official version live for viewing. Q&A Transcript available via Google Groups John’s Personalized Search Presentation via Google Presentations Maile’s Case Sensitivity in Web Search via Google Presentations […]

Bing

GooHoo Faces Hurdles, Yahoo And Microsoft In Talks Again?

Earlier today TechCrunch reported that Yahoo and Microsoft were in acquisition talks again. However, Silicon Alley Insider says that’s incorrect and it’s only about search. But that doesn’t make much sense either given the recent rejection of that very proposal by Yahoo, unless the terms now being discussed are substantially different than before. CNBC says […]

SEO

June 2008 California Fire Maps

Wildfires, again, in my home state of California. People are looking for maps of where they are at, so here are some resources: NOTE: For the latest fires, see this fire maps section of Search Engine Land, where any updates are listed. California Fires 2008 is an excellent map pinpointing fires across the state. Just […]

SEO

What’s A 404 To Do?

Have you ever written a blog post or an article and after publishing it, gotten an email telling you that one of your links is broken? It happens to all of us once in a while. But what happens to the links that slip through the cracks and remain broken? They become unused link juice […]

Google Ads

Mr. Google, Tear Down This Google Trends Wall!

About two seconds after Google Trends For Websites came out, people started noticing that one company’s websites oddly had no data available — Google’s own. Google will tell you all about the traffic to competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft but gives away nothing about itself. The same is true for the newly-released Google Ad Planner […]

Local

Google Introduces Map Maker For “Uncharted” Regions

There’s an interesting analogy to the 15th and 16th Centuries when European explorers (or colonialists) were out sailing and mapping the globe. The world was not entirely known and mapped at that time. So it is today on the Internet. While many areas are highly developed and well documented in online mapping, there are others […]

Google

Google Adds “Report Images” To Web Search Results

Finding adult images on Google by doing an ordinary web search is not all that uncommon these days. In fact, I reported one such as in March and another case this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable. What I also noticed this morning was a new feature to “report images” to Google that are found […]

Apple

Google The “Moral Compass” Of The US Justice System?

What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer from the New York Times documents a case that is underway in the US legal system where Google Trends was brought in to determine the morality of what is sexually explicit content. The case is about a Florida-based porn web site that the state wants to prove is […]

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