More from Search Engine Land: Page 4

PPC

Report: Yahoo Gains Marketers, Ad Share

SEM tool provider AdGooroo today released a report that explores ad coverage per keyword among the big three engines in Q1 2009; it’s a hypothetical proxy for search revenues. The report concludes, among other things, that Yahoo has gained advertiser share and coverage (largely at Microsoft’s expense) during the quarter: The biggest surprise this quarter, […]

PPC

Survey: Search Marketers Underutilizing Sophisticated Metrics

Dylan wrote, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothing to lose,” but when you’re spending real dollars on search engine marketing you have plenty lose. And yet, according recent survey of 500 marketers, most search marketers still use the most basic metrics in evaluating the performance of their programs. How basic? While marketers picked […]

PPC

Smart Bidding Requires Smart Ad Clusters

Proper bidding requires smart, flexible data structures that allow keywords to be tagged with attributes. If bidding clusters and analysis are wedded to account structures you're leaving opportunity on the table.

Content

FDA Cracks Down On Pharma Search Ads

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has sent letters to a number of pharmaceutical manufacturers to alert them that they were in violation of acceptable marketing practices in relation to their paid search marketing campaigns. The basic gist of the letter is that when these pharmaceutical companies advertise on Google they are a.) not […]

Local

Relating Gladwellian Concepts To Local Search

Depending on whom you ask, the search industry is either reaching a tipping point, or it has already passed it. Online search is an unstoppable force, and there is no doubt that the platform for delivering results has changed and will continue to evolve as local search improves. The author who helped make the phrase […]

Google

The Growth Of Framebars & Kevin Rose On The DiggBar

The DiggBar has been out for about a week now. Since then, there continues to be concerns over twin issues of whether it robs sites of link love and frames their contents in a way that’s unfair to publishers. I had a good conversation with Digg cofounder Kevin Rose today about these issues and how […]

Microsoft

Microsoft Cuts Live Labs Staff By Half, Will Focus On Search

PaidContent.org reports that Microsoft’s Live Labs group has been cut in half, and the remaining crew will focus only on search. The departing team members will move on to other Microsoft product groups, such as Live Search, Windows Mobile, and Microsoft Advertising. In a post on the Live Labs Blog, Microsoft downplays the changes: “…moving […]

Microsoft

Yahoo, Microsoft Talking Again: Report

All Things Digital reports that Yahoo and Microsoft are talking once again — not about an acquisition, but about possible search and advertising partnership opportunities. The report says talks have been going on for “several weeks” and included a face-to-face meeting last week with new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. All […]

PPC

Large PPC & SEO Campaign Management – Webcasts Next Week

Don’t miss our upcoming webcasts next week: Tuesday, April 14, Marin Software’s Marc Barach and Chris Wine will discuss the “pain points” in large paid search campaigns, including reporting and analytics, linking conversion data with click and cost data, and calculating bids and hitting ROI goals. “Rx for Large Paid Search Campaigns: Anatomy of an […]

Ecommerce

Google Tweaks Search Results Display For Review Sites

As spotted by Google Operating System, Google is testing a new tweak to its search results for pages that involve reviews. It looks like this: This appears to be a limited test; I don’t see the same “Rating” with stars when I search for that product name. In any case, it’s another evolution in what […]

Content

Do Your Landing Pages “Feel” Right?

Question: What do web users and professional athletes have in common? Answer: They both make fast decisions about their next action based on limited information in the blink of an eye. This thought occurred to me as I was reading How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It’s quite an amazing book. I say that because […]

Content

Google To Create “Hulu” For Music Video, Moves Toward Inclusion Of More Professional Content On YouTube

YouTube spawned Hulu and Hulu is having a big influence on the future of YouTube. Hulu has had great success with brand advertisers, while YouTube has struggled to sell itself to brands despite being the dominant video site online (see chart below). Accordingly, last month ClickZ reported that YouTube was getting a Hulu-like makeover that […]

SEO

Yahoo Loses Toolbar Deals; Search Share To Drop?

The Wall Street Journal reports that the loss of two agreements with computer makers could cost Yahoo as much as 15% of its search traffic in the next 12-18 months. Early this year, HP made Live Search the default search toolbar on its computers. And back in October, the WSJ says, Acer switched from Yahoo […]

Content

Google Slowly Turning YouTube Into A Moneymaker

There are signs this week that Google is slowly turning YouTube into a legitimate source of revenue, but there are also questions whether that’s happening quickly enough and if the revenue will ever become a profit. Let’s start with an AdAge article that reports YouTube is selling ads on about 9% of its video views […]

Search features

Yahoo Expands BOSS Developer Tools

Yahoo has added a few new tools to its BOSS platform that the company says will give developers more insight to their search results and help build unique search experiences. The new tools include: Integration with Delicious content – end-users can get Delicious saves, top tags, and count information within their search results Advanced language […]

Google Analytics

Recovering From The Blue Screen Of Death As An SEO

Last week I was jolted by booting up my computer only to see the blue screen of death. The computer was dead, dead, dead and I had to replace it with a new one, going through the painful process of restoring all of my software, tools and data. The old computer was using Windows XP, […]

Google News

News Media Bites The Search That Feeds It: Hitwise Data

This week’s battle royale has pitted newspapers and traditional media against Google and online news. If you somehow missed it, the CliffsNotes version is that traditional media (Associated Press, newspapers, etc.) are accusing Internet sites (search engines, news aggregators, etc.) of diverting traffic that should be going to news web sites, profiting off news content […]

Bing

Hitwise: Google’s Lead Growing, Searches Getting Longer

Google’s share of the U.S. search market continues to grow according to Hitwise data released today. (PDF download) Google’s market share rose from 72.11% in February to 72.39% in March, while both Yahoo and Live Search saw declines. Year-over-year numbers are also in Google’s favor: It’s up 8% over March 2008, while Yahoo and Live […]

Paid social

Paris Hilton Is Top Twitter Search Celebrity

I’m filing this one under “I don’t get it” — according to new Hitwise data, Paris Hilton is the most-searched celebrity on Twitter. Do that many people really want to find Paris Hilton? And follow her? The data covers searches done at search.twitter.com during the week that ended on March 21, 2009. Searches for the […]

PPC

Paid Search: Building Brand Loyalty Two Seconds At A Time

There’s no question that the vast majority of brand loyalty is created post click—once consumers are brought to a landing page with relevant offers and other brand messaging.   However, what happens in that 2-3 second window prior to the click?  A lot more brand building than you think. First impressions count Search marketers spend countless […]

PPC

SEMPO Releases Survey Data Revealing State Of SEM

SEMPO formally released data on the state of search engine marketing, its annual survey of agencies and marketers. This year’s survey consisted of 800 respondents from all over the globle. However 68 percent of respondents were from the US, with 20 percent coming from a range of countries. Seven percent of respondents were from Canada […]

Google

Google Image Search Adds Color Picker

Google Operating System spotted a new feature on Google Image Search. The feature allows you to click on the color of images you want to be found, and Google will filter your query based on images that match the query and the color you selected. For example, I search on [flowers] and then chose the […]

SEO

Yahoo Announces March 2009 Search Update

A little over a week ago we reported on the March ’09 Yahoo Search update. Yahoo has finally confirmed the update with a weather report on the Yahoo Search Blog. Dan Rampton from Yahoo Search said: We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and […]

Google

Singh Cassidy Departs Google For VC Firm

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is the latest high profile executive to leave Google, VentureBeat reports, to become a “CEO in residence” for VC firm Accel Partners. Her bio is still on the Google site. She had been serving as President, Asia-Pacific & Latin America Operations. However she was the first head of Local for Google in […]

Ecommerce

Yahoo Going Back To The Future Under Bartz

Yahoo watchers have heard this before: The company is planning to “create community from isolated sites,” according to the headline of a Reuters feature Tuesday that includes comments from co-founder David Filo and VP of Social Platforms Neal Sample. It’s the idea of “social search” — creating value in the connections between users and relying […]

Google News

Amid Tensions Google’s Eric Schmidt Addresses Newspaper Conference

Google CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the Newspaper Association of America conference in San Diego this morning. It comes against the backdrop of the AP copyright controversy, rising tension between Google and newspapers and publisher frustrations with their own declining revenues. Some have accused Google of devaluing their content. Schmidt’s talk was generally sunny and upbeat […]

Link building

A Big Bunch Of Link Building Ideas

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve come across  some great link building discussions, techniques and Twitter tools I  wanted to share here.  I also wanted to mention a foundational linking tactic we’re using and seeing great results from. Let’s start with a valuable tip I found on one of the SEO forums . The value of outbound links The topic […]

Content

Google News Shows News Spikes On Timeline

Google Operating System spotted that Google News started to add timelines to their news clusters. For example, if you search for obama in Google News and then click on the link “all ### news articles,” you will then be taken to the cluster of news items on that topic. That news cluster shows a timeline […]

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