More from Search Engine Land: Page 4

SEO

Ask CEO Safka to Depart

According to the Wall Street Journal, Ask.com CEO Jim Safka is leaving the company. He will become the head of Chegg, Inc., which rents textbooks to students online. The decision to leave is apparently Safka’s, for personal reasons. Longtime IAC executive Scott Garell will take over as “President of Ask Networks.” In its most recent […]

SEO

SMN Webcast Thursday: Search Marketing For Small Business

On Thursday at 1 PM EDT, tune in to Search Marketing Now to hear Disa Johnson, Coordinator of Paid Search Boot Camp at SMX East, present a free webcast for small business owners – “Search Marketing for Small Business: Basics for Online Success.” According to a recent Nielsen/WebVisible study, there’s a gap between search-savvy consumers […]

Apple

SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 12, 2009

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: How To Optimize For Conversion In Organic Search Results In the past, SEO success was measured by rankings of target keywords; then the focus moved to traffic; today we have moved […]

SEO

How To Optimize For Conversion In Organic Search Results

In the past, SEO success was measured by rankings of target keywords; then the focus moved to traffic; today we have moved into the bottom-line era: organic traffic should be measured by its impact on revenue. This post is based on a presentation delivered at eMetrics San Jose 2009. It is about ways to integrate […]

Google

Greece Bans Google Street View, Google Says ‘No, You Didn’t’

There are several reports today that Greece has banned Google’s Street View … but Google disagrees. Privacy is Greece’s main concern, just as it’s been with the other villages, towns, cities, national governments, and other organizations that have lined up against Google Street View. Greece’s Data Protection Authority (DPA) announced on Monday that it’s banned […]

LinkedIn

Google Search Now Supports Microformats and Adds “Rich Snippets” to Search Results

Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called “rich snippets” that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites […]

SEO

Google Is A Scraper Site, Says National Association Of Realtors

With support from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), the Indianapolis Metropolitan Board of REALTORS® (MIBOR) has forced some of its members to stop allowing certain MLS listings to be crawled and indexed by Google because Google (and other search engines) is considered a “scraper” site. This is the latest episode in a long-running battle […]

PPC

How To Pitch A Performance Search Engine Marketing Agency

You have probably heard multiple pitches from advertising agencies and SEM firms looking to take over the search engine marketing campaign for your company. When was the last time one of these firms offered to pay for all of the ads up-front and be paid only for the sales and leads generated? Not too often, […]

SEO

An Insider’s Look At SMX Advanced: Jeffrey Rohrs

Move over, Denny Crane: SMX has its own legal star programming and moderating panels in Seattle next month. In our fourth installment of our behind the scenes look at how SMX gets put together, Jeff Rohrs talks about paid search, law, fraud and what he’s looking forward to most at SMX Advanced. You are a […]

Apple

Live Blogging Google Searchology 2009

Almost an annual event, Google Searchology is a time when Google struts its search stuff in front of assorted reporters. Today’s event gets going at 10am Pacific time. I’ll be live blogging from this page, and you can also watch the event yourself via this webcast. You can also follow @google on Twitter, which will […]

Link building

How A Twitter Reputation Algorithm Needs To Work

Big news last week: Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results. Twitter’s @Santosh Jayaram has indicated Twitter Search, which currently searches only Twitter post text, will begin crawling links and indexing the content of pages posted in tweets. To help with search result ranking, Twitter is creating a “reputation” ranking system that among other things […]

Google

Why Google Radio Ads Failed

Radio Tunes Out Google in Rare Miss for Web Titan from the Wall Street Journal has some excellent history on why Google Radio ultimately failed earlier this year. I’ll quote the story early on, but the Wall Street Journal piece is excellent, on its own. A look at what went wrong shows that Google misjudged […]

Bing

Microsoft Shutting Down QnA, Questions & Answers Site

LiveSide reports Microsoft has decided to close down the Question and Answer portal, MSN QnA as of May 21st. Microsoft said: At this time, we are closing the QnA site, but the experience of running QnA and gathering all of the great feedback you’ve shared with us will certainly influence future product direction. QnA initially […]

Content

Google Sued For Infringing On All Texas Trademark Owners

Eric Goldman reports that Google was sued yesterday by FBX for infringing on the trademarks of all of the Texas trademark owners. Yes, this is a massive class action suit, not just against Google but also against YouTube, AOL, Tuner, MySpace and IAC. We have had many suits filed against Google over trademark infringement in […]

Ecommerce

Vote For Second Annual Google 4 Doodle Competition

In February Google announced the second Google 4 Doodle competition and now, Google is ready for people to start voting on the finalists. You can vote by clicking here and selecting your favorite Google Doodles from each grade group. There were about 400 state finalists with 40 regional winners. You vote for the regional winners […]

Content

Did Google Really Consider Buying a Piece of the NY Times?

According to a Fortune story that appeared yesterday, Google seriously considered and then decided against buying some or all of a hedge fund’s 19 percent stake in the New York Times. According to the article: Last month, sources tell me, former Hollywood mogul David Geffen made an offer to buy the 19% stake in the […]

Paid social

Will Marketing Kill Social Media?

Anyone reading this post is likely to be someone who spends some, if not all, of his or her time at work trying to make use of social media to market products & brands. We spend hours trying to maximize the benefit for our employers or clients from sites such as Facebook, YouTube & Twitter […]

Apple

Google’s Anti-Trust Problem Appears Very Real

At Google’s recent press event last week, in advance of its annual shareholder meeting, CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to brush off the notion that he might be compelled to resign from Apple’s board because of  a potential problem with an “interlocking directorate” (common directors on competing firms). This reaction is consistent with Google’s public calm, […]

Google Analytics

SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 11, 2009

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: MSN Overhauls City Guides, Integrates With Live Search MSN and Live Search probably don’t get enough attention in the local search field, but the reality is that there’s a solid core […]

Bing

MSN Overhauls City Guides, Integrates With Live Search

MSN and Live Search probably don’t get enough attention in the local search field, but the reality is that there’s a solid core of usage thanks to the default experience offered on many PCs — Windows OS and Internet Explorer. (On a purely anecdotal level, an old blog post I wrote about adding a business […]

Ecommerce

Hackers Take Control Of Google Morocco For Several Hours

TechCrunch reported that Google Morocco was taken over by hackers for several hours. The reports say that the hackers gained access to Google’s domain name through the country’s registrar, NIC.ma. The DNS information was then changed to point to a different server until Google regained access and pointed the domain name back to the Google […]

PPC

Attribution Alchemy: Mining Your Sales Funnel

Many online advertisers find themselves in the never-ending and seemingly unattainable quest to achieve the best marketing mix across all channels, including paid search. They continually struggle with monetizing paid search in terms of sales and customer engagement, wondering how to measure real ROI against these two metrics. However, most marketers don’t realize that the […]

Local

Tapping Twitter To Talk To Your Customers

How many good conversations have you had where one person spends the entire time talking? That’s not a conversation, of course. That’s someone simply spouting off. A conversation requires dialogue, people taking turns talking and listening. The online world is no different, and we’ve reached a point where true online conversations occur all the time. […]

Apple

Fights In The Google Monopoly Debate Miss Key Points

The noise about whether Google is a monopoly that needs to be controlled continues to ramp up, with Google itself releasing a “charm offensive” set of slides after its lobbying using those slides was outed by Consumer Watchdog. I’ll cover that below, but as I watch the debate continue over whether Google has too much […]

LinkedIn

An Insider’s Look At SMX Advanced: Michelle Robbins

Continuing our series of behind-the-scenes insights from our SMX Advanced programming team, today we have a Q&A with Michelle Robbins, Third Door Media’s Technology Director, and the operations whiz behind Search Engine Land, Sphinn and our other web sites. You are the Technology Director at Third Door Media. Tell us what that means. Michelle Robbins: […]

Apple

SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 8, 2009

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google To ‘Integrate’ Microblogging? While Twitter is looking at ways to be more search-ey, Google is apparently thinking about ways to be more microbloggy. Buried in a Reuters article about Google’s […]

Google

Google To ‘Integrate’ Microblogging?

While Twitter is looking at ways to be more search-ey, Google is apparently thinking about ways to be more microbloggy. Buried in a Reuters article about Google’s shareholders meeting yesterday is this paragraph about the company’s interest in the social web: “Company executives who appeared alongside Schmidt at the media briefing said Google was looking […]

Google

Google Does TV Ads, To Push Chrome Browser In Commercials

It used to be common wisdom that Google never did consumer marketing. That’s changed over the past few years, with Google doing everything from billboards to radio ads to bus “wraps” to push particular Google products. Now it boldly goes into that final frontier, TV ads in the United States. It’s a first for Google. […]

SEO

SMN Webcast: Get Your Questions Answered By SEO Experts

This Tuesday, May 12, at 1 PM Eastern Search Marketing Now will present a unique format in the webcast “Ask iProspect: Strategies & Tactics for World-Class SEO.” Senior management from iProspect will be on hand to answer questions from registrants on what it takes with the biggest and the best when it comes to search […]

Ecommerce

Official: Wolfram Alpha Launches May 18

After briefly going live yesterday, Wolfram Alpha — the much anticipated fact engine — was quickly shutdown. Now the company tells us that May 18 is the official launch data. For more about the service, see my write-up, Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”. Postscript by Barry Schwartz: They have moved up the date to […]

Bing

Live Search Mobile Adds Videos & Baseball Scores

The Live Search Blog announced they have added video search results and baseball scores to Live Search Mobile. I decided to take a few screen shots of live.com on my iPhone: Live Search Mobile Video Results: Live Search Mobile Baseball Info: Why the Mets? Well, I am a Met fan, or at least, I try […]

Content

Designing For The Subconscious Mind

In last month’s column, I brought up the idea that the first impression your web site makes can have a bigger impact than many of the more traditional design considerations we tend to regularly obsess about. My theory is that users’ gut-level reactions when seeing a new site for the first time—and the split-second judgments […]

Google

Gmail Goes Offline Again

Gmail has now been offline for the past twenty minutes or so. Just take a look at Twitter Search to see how many people are upset with the downtime. Here is a screen capture: This outage seems to be impacting both web access, pop access and imap access. Hopefully this outage won’t be as long […]

Apple

The Next Decade: Can Google Stay On Top?

There’s a feeling in the air of change — from one era to another and, more precisely, from one type of media culture to another. The hearings on Capitol Hill yesterday on the “future of journalism” reflect this transition in which traditional media are under intense pressure and fighting for their lives in some cases. […]

Ecommerce

Wolfram Alpha Now Live (Er, Was Live)

Wolfram Alpha, the much anticipated fact engine, is now live. That means, you can go to wolframalpha.com and test it out for yourself. Keep in mind, Wolfram Alpha is not a Google competitor, it is a beast of its own. Do comment and let us know your thoughts. For more about this new search engine, […]

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