TechCrunch has screen shots of Google AdWords ads targeting Joshua Schachter, a former well-known Yahoo employee, and leading to Yahoo’s recruiting web site. In fact, Joshua Schachter tweeted about it yesterday, where he said, “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.” Soon later, Rasmus Lerdorf, another former Yahoo employee, tweeted that he was being […]
I’d like to humbly offer three steps to becoming a conversion rate optimization guru and a better person into the bargain. At first I thought I might like to write this post as a semi-comic (if I wrote it right) Glengarry Glen Ross style rant “A-B-C…A-always, B-be, C-conversion rate 0ptimizing,” but I decided that might […]
ReadWriteWeb is reporting from “sources close to the project” that Yahoo will shut down MyBloglog next month. MyBlogLog doesn’t hold the blogging community’s attention today the way it did a few years ago, but if the report is true, it will disappoint many who continue to use the service. There was a time in 2006 […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Behavioral Targeting & Google Analytics: How To Create Personas Following my last post on behavioral targeting, which was an overview of the field, I will provide a more hands-on approach in […]
Following my last post on behavioral targeting, which was an overview of the field, I will provide a more hands-on approach in this post. To briefly recap, behavioral targeting involves creating multiple “personas” that represent multiple users of your site, and using analytics to create a unique experience for each persona group based on observed […]
Are you marketing only to the larger countries in the world? That may be a mistake, and I’ll explain in this post, where I’m taking you to one of the smaller countries in Europe. The Netherlands is only 16,000 square miles, but still has 17 million people living on that small piece of ground, and […]
The PEW Internet and American Life Project just released new information about use of the internet by Latino adults in the United States. How does this relate to search engine optimization? Understanding who’s online and how they search is core to success in search acquisition beyond simply ranking well. Over a billion people are now […]
When you begin a link campaign, whether you’ve inherited one or you’re starting fresh, it’s obviously a good idea to get a sense of where things stand. There are tons of articles and tools out there that exist to help you do this, and that’s fantastic (and much nicer than what we had a few […]
Pacific WebWorks says it is settling Google suit from the Associate Press reports that the ‘Google Money Kit’ type of alleged scammer will settle the dispute with Google. A week ago, we reported Google filed suit against this organization, in order to help prevent these types of scams. Pacific WebWorks, one of the companies in […]
MapQuest or variations on its name represent five of the top 22 search queries in the travel category (in November) according to Hitwise. However Google Maps is solidly in first place now as the top mapping site online. That puts MapQuest in the position of having to figure out whether to be content with its […]
According to the Wall Street Journal Yahoo is compelling most employees to take the week after Xmas off, using vacation or unpaid leave. It is also shutting down offices until after January 1. The move is an effort to save money. Yahoo employees over the past few years have been “encouraged” but until now not […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Paper: Google Using Legal And Accounting Tricks To Avoid UK Taxes The Guardian in the UK is reporting that Google is using “a cross-border network of subsidiary companies to ensure it […]
The Guardian in the UK is reporting that Google is using “a cross-border network of subsidiary companies to ensure it did not pay a penny in corporation tax on its £1.6bn advertising revenues in Britain.” The publication says that most of the UK-based revenue is recognized in Ireland where tax rates are lower: While much […]
It is that time of the year again, the Google Holiday logo blitz is on for 2009. Google posted their first logo today, and will be archiving them up until the day of Christmas, I believe. You will be able to see them all at google.com/logos/holidays-2009.html. So keep an eye out for them. In other […]
Something apparently happened. First TechCruch reported Yelp was going to sell to Google for $500 million or more. There was a frenzy of speculative coverage (including by me) that followed this initial report. The NY Times appeared to independently confirm that Yelp was going to sell. And I spoke to someone (not at Yelp) who […]
Small design firm sues Microsoft over Bing name from Ars Technica reports a St. Louis based design firm named Bing! is suing Microsoft for using their name. Bing! Information Design (www.bing.biz) is suing over “trademark infringement, unfair competition, and tortious interference with business expectancy.” They filed their case on Wednesday, December 16th in Circuit Court […]
Paid search landing pages matter. Picking the wrong pages -- as machines usually do -- hurts conversion rates which forces down bids, which shrinks the size of the paid search program.
Color me tired. I got a report of a site that reprinted one of our articles without permission. Checking it out, I discovered that miserable combination of someone making money off content they don’t own, paying nothing to host that stolen content on Google’s Blogger service and earning off that content through Google’s AdSense ads. […]
Whether they like it or not, every small business has a digital footprint: who they are, what they do, where they are located, and how customers feel about their products and services. Dialogue is in the air: Google’s newly announced focus on real-time search (read: search of dialogue), and the rumors of a possible acquisition […]
The death of actress Brittany Murphy is probably the first test for Google’s new real time search results. Earlier this year, when Michael Jackson died, it took several minutes for the news to make it into Google despite the extraordinary number of searches it was getting. The integration of real time results was designed in […]
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 Group Your Keywords; Plus: Q&A With WordStream’s Larry Kim Organizing your paid search keywords into the right ad groups can be a difficult task for even the best search […]
Organizing your paid search keywords into the right ad groups can be a difficult task for even the best search engine marketers. Many times, a keyword may seem to naturally fall into multiple ad groups. The engines tell us the best practice is to not have the same keyword in different groups, because then the […]
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.
Google will probably be fighting legal battles in European courts and appearing before EU regulators for some time to come. For the time being Google has lost (at least for now) a copyright case in France arising from book scanning. According to Reuters: The court found against Google after the La Martiniere group, which controls […]
I was pointed to a filed affidavit (PDF) between Jenzabar & Robert Maginn as the plaintiffs versus Long Bow Group as the defendants. In short, it seems like the plaintiff is suing the defendants over trademark infringement within a site’s keyword meta tags. What is interesting is not that there is a lawsuit about this, […]
Google Blogoscoped reports that one of his readers noticed a “Google Guru” link in his Google Account page. Google Guru was launched in January 2007 in Russia as a social question and answer site. You can access it at guru.google.co.th/guru/ and here is a picture: What is interesting is that Google closed down their Google […]
In the first installment of this series I asserted that your SEO performance is suffering in proportion to how powerfully you are able to communicate the opportunity to executives. Winning the resources required to grow the channel requires a basic set of metrics. In the subsequent installments, I showed you how to use “Jedi” performance […]
I preferred search engine results pages (SERPs) before other forms of social media became the rage. I think the commercial web search engines are giving social media items far more attention and validation than they deserve. Do you?
Google is suffering through a somewhat embarrassing turn of events regarding its Favorite Place decals, but the company that’s actually responsible for the problem says a fix is on the way. QuickMark, makers of an iPhone app that has led users to the wrong URL when a Favorite Places decal is scanned, says it has […]
TechCrunch is reporting that Google is “advanced acquisition negotiations” to buy Yelp for $500 million or more. TechCrunch has been generally correct about many of the rumors it has reported recently (i.e., Google Phone) so we should take this seriously. Yelp has raised a little over $30 million over several funding rounds. Revenues are heading […]
While Google has recently announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains, Bing says it’s still working on supporting the canonical tag on a single domain, and suggests webmasters should rely on other means to manage duplicate content. The rel=”canonical” link element was introduced earlier this year as a way for webmasters to […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The Google Phone/Nexus One Was (Briefly) In My Hand Yesterday after I had coffee with someone (who is not a Google employee) I was briefly given the “Nexus One” to look […]
Yesterday after I had coffee with someone (who is not a Google employee) I was briefly given the “Nexus One” to look at and fondle. I was not permitted to take a photo of it but did have a chance to do a few things on it and was able to form a few “first […]
Both comScore and Nielsen put out November search numbers that show Google and Bing up and Yahoo losing share. According to comScore: Americans conducted 14.4 billion searches in November, up 1 percent from October. Google Sites accounted for 9.5 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.5 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.5 billion), Ask Network (548 million) […]
In order to be found online by potential customers, local businesses can take action in a number of ways. In my last post, I presented data on how many Columbus businesses advertise online, publish a website, or update their online listing. When properly implemented, these actions can significantly improve a local business’s online visibility. However, […]
An interesting post from Elliot compared the number of searches in a month on Google versus the number of visitors received on type in traffic domains. He used the Google Keyword Tool and looked at the traffic of domains to compare the two. The results showed that longer domains received less type in traffic as […]
Yahoo engineers in France went on strike and protested yesterday over Carol Bartz wanting to close down the R&D center in Grenoble and ultimately putting 78 engineers out of work. Some of these protestors created a web site named Yahoo It Was You on a Google owned Blogspot, as a way to mock Yahoo’s “Its […]
Fast Flip, the Google experiment that aims to make reading news online more like reading a newspaper or magazine, has expanded its list of sources. When Fast Flip launched in September, it had three dozen publishers on board. With today’s announcement, the number and variety of sources has grown: Today, we’re excited to be adding […]
I shouldn’t take the bait — Robert Scoble’s latest missive that SEO isn’t important. But sometimes I can’t help myself for wanting to provide some perspective. I’ve covered the space going on 14 years now. I’ve heard the SEO is dead spiel over and over and over again. I feel like a revisit to the […]
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 & Bing’s Unequal Facebook Status Update Deals Last week, Google seemingly caught up with Bing in the war over status updates from social sites, announcing a deal to get real […]