Mar 10, 2008 at 10:46am ET by Danny Sullivan
Search Month is a monthly newsletter that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past month. It’s also available by feed here. Below, news about Search Engine Land itself, then our 10 most popular stories from February 2008, then a major story for various search topics along with other stories related to those topics since our last monthly newsletter through today.
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Search Engine Land News
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Apologies for being behind with this issue of Search Month! I was pretty busy with our SMX West search marketing conference that happened at the end of February and catching up on things after returning from it!
We all had a great time at SMX West, and it was nice to meet so many readers personally. In the Conferences section of Search Month below, you can catch up on all the press reports and blogging out of the show, including Google winning the SMX Search Bowl trivia competition.
While SMX West has passed, we have an entire line-up of shows coming along for the rest of the year. Munich, Sydney, and China all have events next month, as well as an encore presentation of our SMX Social Media event. Be sure to check out the posts below for some news about upcoming events:
Here’s the SMX events calendar:
Remember, a good way to keep up on all of these events is by reading the SMX Blog. You can also socialize in a variety of ways:
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Top 10 Most Popular Stories: February 2008
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1) Microsoft Makes $45 Billion Bid To Buy Yahoo – Microsoft is to bid $31 per share to Yahoo’s board of directors to purchase the company, a deal potentially worth $45 billion. Details, some history, and analysis.
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2) How To Shout On Social Media Sites Without Screaming – No feature that I can recall in recent memory has polarized the social news sphere more than the ability to mass-alert stories to other users for immediate votes. StumbleUpon has the "send to" feature, Propeller has "site-mail," and Digg has "shouts." As I’ve said before, the feature is a great one in principle but can be a horrible one in practice. As with any tool you give to people, half your job is to educate them on how to use the feature and set some guidelines so that it’s not abused.
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3) Hackers Launch Goolag: A Google Vulnerability Scanner – A group of hackers named Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) launched a search tool powered by Google to help see if your sites are vulnerable to a hacking attempt. The tool is named Goolag, and by typing in a domain name it may return site vulnerabilities. Techworld reports the tool makes "it easy for unskilled users to track down vulnerabilities and sensitive information on specific Web sites or broad Web domains." The tool uses the Google Custom Search engine and has a detailed specification on how it works.
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4) A Big Roundup Of Link Building Tools - Ask any link builder what link issues they’re consistently asked about and one of them will be linking tools. Link building is such a time consuming and detailed process that it’s only natural people look for tools and techniques to maximize their time. Those who spend a lot of time link building are familiar with standard linking tools, but a number of non-commercial tools, resource sites and "find me" tricks that aren’t as well known. Below, some tools and resources you may not know about that can streamline your link building campaigns. See also:
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5) Google Contractor Sues Google Over Google Sky Layer – "Lawsuit claims Google stole idea for Sky layer in Earth" from News.com reports a Google contractor named Jonathan Cobb is suing Google for allegedly stealing a Sky layer idea from him. Sky layers are data in both graphical and textual form that are used in Google Earth. Jonathan Cobb filed suit in an Atlanta federal district court, suing Google for $25 million in punitive damages.
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6) Google AdWords To "Strictly Enforce" Display URL Policy – PPC Hero wrote that Google would be making changes to the AdWords display URL policy on April 1st. I asked Google for more details on this policy change and they informed me that the policy is remaining the same, but starting April 1st, Google will begin "strictly enforcing" it. Last Saturday, account managers began notifying advertisers that the display URL policy will be enforced, as a ‘heads-up’ to those advertisers. Why is Google now going to enforce this policy? It seems like more and more advertisers are complaining that competitors are not playing fair, but there can be other reasons. Google told me it is their "goal is to have policies that are fair, consistent, and adaptable."
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7) Two Practical Landing Page Tricks That Will Save You Money – Do you want to know how to reduce your cost per conversion by up to $10.67 and improve your quality score at the same time? Let me tell you a story about how I used two easy landing page optimization tricks to do just this.
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8) MSFT + YHOO: What Would Microsoft Yahoo Look Like? – The conference call has happened, and despite saying it has a plan to digest Yahoo, Microsoft didn’t share that with the world. Indeed, at one point it was said any plan depended on what Yahoo’s leadership would suggest. That means it’s time for What If. Some thoughts below from me and contributing editor Greg Sterling. We’ve been IMing all day about the move.
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9) Google Elections: Super Tuesday Map And Twitter Updates – Google’s LatLong blog has two posts relevant to today’s "Super Tuesday" US presidential primaries. The first is about a Super Tuesday primary map that presents a range of content, including video, on election results — as Google has in the last couple of primaries. The map also features real-time Twitter updates from people voting or otherwise "out in the field" (screenshot below). This is very much like the real-time map edits viewer feature that Google introduced in late January.
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10) Updated: Yahoo Layoffs Happening Now – The expected Yahoo layoffs started a few hours ago. Two very good people I know are among those cut. No doubt we’re going to be hearing from many more. Below, a rundown on reports I’ve spotted from others on the web about the cuts. As more comes in, we’ll update or do a fresh post. (NOTE: First round of updates now added; Bradley Horowitz is the top-ranking search person to go, apparently leaving voluntarily to Google):
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AOL
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Citysearch And AOL Announce Reciprocal Content And Ad Distribution Deal – Citysearch has announced a deal with AOL that provides Citysearch reviews and content (e.g., video) and place local Citysearch advertisers on AOL local properties. The two firms will share revenue from clicks or leads generated from AOL distribution.
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Ask.com: Business Issues
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Obit: A West Coast Digerati Deadpools Ask.com – Goodbye, Ask.com. You caught my eye back in 1997 as an unusual meta search engine that asked questions to get answers. By 1998, I counted you alongside Google and Direct Hit as shining examples of what to watch in search. You’d dumped depending on others for search results and started providing answers using your own human editors. I hung with you over the years, cheered when you acquired the impressive Teoma crawler in 2001. I was thrilled when you alone among the major search engines dumped the traditional search metaphor for the Ask3D view last year. Now you’re just for women, apparently. No more appealing to the "West Coast elite" or "digerati" you say. You can tell yourself that, if it helps. The truth is, you’re dead. You’re about to join the legion of other has-been search engines, some of which you own or power, like Excite and iWon. See also:
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Ask.com: Searching
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If You Like Digg, You’ll Love Ask’s Big News – Ask.com has revamped its news aggregation service, adding lots of bells and whistles and a few useful features. Most notably, Ask has embraced the social media tenet that you need others to tell you how important a news story is, with its new "BigFactor" ratings. See also:
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Ask.com: Paid Search
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Ask.com Adds More Sponsored Ads, Pushing Organic Results Below Fold – I was messing around with the Ask.com interface on my Mac and decided to compare some results between my Mac browser and Internet Explorer for PC. I noticed that Ask.com is now displaying five sponsored results for many keyword searches. The organic results are now below the fold, like they once were before dropping Jeeves.
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B2B
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Eight B2B Landing Page Conversion Tips – Driving prospects to your website is only half the battle. What can B2B marketers do to entice visitors to take desired online actions… and improve conversion rates? Here are eight easy-to-implement tips designed to improve landing page relevance, persuade action, build credibility, and maximize response rate. See also:
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Business & Revenues
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comScore Paid Search Data & How The Sky Might Not Be Falling – Last week comScore came out with a report that showed a 7% sequential decline vs. December 2007 in paid search ad clicks. Plus, they showed an 8% drop in the number of clicks per Google searcher from December 2007. The report set shock-waves through Wall Street and caused the stock to drop and drove concerns about a recession. James Lamberti of comScore spoke about the concerns on the Searchscape panel at SMX West. He expressed that after careful analysis, the data does not directly support evidence of a recession or a weaker Google. See also:
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Conferences
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Danny Sullivan Tackles Search 3.0 And 4.0 In SMX West Keynote – I thought I’d gracefully retired from the Danny Sullivan Keynote Review business. Comparing Danny to Edward R. Murrow, assessing how the attendance stretched the room capacity… ahh, they were good times. Then I awoke to find myself in a large hall at the Santa Clara Conference Center. It wasn’t a dream! Turns out I was only a bit sleepy because that O’Hare blizzard delay caused me to land in San Jose at 3:00 a.m. on this day, February 26th, 2008. It was now 9:01 a.m., and a fresh Sullivan keynote was beginning at SMX West. There I was, sitting over to the right-hand side of the room (Danny’s left) near where Matt Cutts was hiding. Laptop open, battery charged. Danny speaks. See also:
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Facebook
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Facebook’s New Chief Operating Officer, Ex-Google VP, Sandberg – Facebook announced Sheryl Sandberg as the new Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Sandberg worked at Google for six years as Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations. Sandberg will join Facebook on March 24, 2008 and is responsible for helping the company scale its operations and expand its presence globally. See also:
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Google: AdSense
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Google Pushes AdSense For Video Again – As expected Google announced another push to get advertisers and publishers to utilize video ads. Yes, Google did a pilot video ad program back in May 2007 and then another video effort in October 2007. But said its has learned a lot from these tests programs and made some changes to the new one out today. See also:
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Google: AdWords
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What, Exactly, Are Google AdSense "Other" Relevancy Factors? – It’s been well established that a core—predominant, even—component of the Google AdWords quality-based bidding formula is historical CTR (clickthrough rate). New keywords get treated a bit differently, though; the algorithm must predict CTR based on the similarities of your ad group’s characteristics to historical data in Google’s vault. If you read through Google’s official descriptions, you’ll also see references to "other relevancy factors." What are these mysterious factors? See also:
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Google: Apps
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Google Sites Launches: Replaces Jotspot With Team Sharing Software – Google launched Google Sites, basically a relaunch of Jotspot but with many more features. In short, this new software allows teams to share much like you could with Microsoft’s SharePoint. Google sites offers users five templates, as TechCrunch explains. See also:
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Google: Analytics
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Google Analytics Benchmarking Feature, Data Sharing & Audio Ad Charting – Google Analytics added a new benchmarking feature today. Users can now compare their site’s performance to industry benchmarks, though only if they agree to share their data to help produce such aggregate benchmarks. Another feature added is the ability to see when your Google Audio ads run, in relation to your web site traffic.
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Google: Business Issues
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Google 10K: 55% More Employees, 99% Of Income Via Ads & More – Google’s recent 10-K filing covers growth in employees, continued dependence on ad income and more. See also:
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Google: Employees
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It’s The Culture Stupid: Happy Googlers Sound Off On What They Like About The Place – Last week I spent about an hour and a half at Google’s New York offices talking to John Burke, Director of Industry Development and Marketing. Burke works for Tim Armstrong and has been at Google since 2002 (read: pre-IPO). He seems as enthusiastic as ever about the place. My intention was to discuss some of Google’s product development efforts and ad agency relationships. Instead Burke and I spent most of our time talking about the culture at Google, a subject I’m fascinated by. See also:
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Google: FeedBurner & Reader
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Google: Maps & Local
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Google Maps Categories: Will The Pain End Soon? – Over the past several week I have explored some of the issues involved with categorization of businesses in Google Maps and a work-around for frustrated business owners. Hopefully soon, the need for these sorts of work-arounds will disappear. Recently I had a phone conversation about Google Maps categorization issues with Carter Maslan, one of Google’s geo product directors. The talk was informative and hopefully the first of several that will provide greater insight to the Maps product and its workings. Below, an account of our conversation and what I learned from Google about their efforts to fix the problem. See also:
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Google: Mobile
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Google May Launch Balloons Across World To Provide Mobile Access – Google is interested in possibly using disposable hydrogen-filled balloons packed with miniature versions of cellphone towers inside of them to provide internet access to those people who have a hard time getting it. See also:
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Google: SEO Issues
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Google Debuts "Search Within A Site" Search Box Feature – Yesterday Barry blogged about Google testing a search box for site search within general search results. Today the feature is being fully rolled out for selected queries. It’s really an extension and elaboration of Google Sitelinks. The Google Blog explains: Over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users. See also:
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Google: Searching
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Bush – Tops For "Who Is A Failure" On Google - For years, US President George W. Bush was tops on Google for searches on miserable failure until last year’s Googlebomb "fix" solved his problem on Google. But Bush is back, sort of. People are spotting that Bush’s official White House page is ranking tops for who is a failure on Google. A new Googlebomb? If so, I’ve not seen any reports of people pushing to make this happen. My bet is that all those links out there with anchor text saying "failure" in them are making him come up for a variety of terms combined with "failure." And in fact, he looks to have been ranking this way for some time. See also:
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Google: YouTube
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YouTube To Add Live Video This Year – Steve Chen: YouTube to Add Live Video from NewTeeVee reports that YouTube’s founder said they will be adding live video support this year. Videoblogger Sarah Meyers asked Chen about video blogging, in which he said: 2008. We’ll do it this year. Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually do it this year. See also:
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Health Search
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Vertical Search Provider Healthline Beefs Up Content, Features – Health is one of the "strategic consumer verticals" that Microsoft has identified and is an important consumer and advertiser category for all the big search engines and portals (Google is soon to launch Health after delays). There’s also Steve Case’s much-hyped Revolution Health. (WebMD is the category leader according to comScore.) However one of the best search engines in the health segment is the much less widely known Healthline. Over the past couple of years, the site has been building its content and distribution relationships, as well as its tools and capabilities. Yesterday, the company introduced a range of new content and tools, in fact perhaps too many for a single press release. See also:
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In House SEM
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The Art Of Growing An In-House Search Marketing Team – So you’ve been tasked with building an in-house search marketing team, and now you’re wondering where to start. It’s a daunting task, to be sure. Do you start by rousting the programmers to get the content management system (CMS) into shape? Do you grab a credit card and start up a paid search campaign? Do you start bugging the editorial team to get them to use certain words or phrases, in effect, telling them what to write? The short answer is… yes. See also:
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Link Building
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How Social Media Becomes Link Fertilizer – The title of this article doesn’t mean I’m changing my position on social media as link driver. Yes, it’s possible, but for the overwhelming majority of web sites, a widespread and costly social linking strategy is a waste of time and money. Go ahead, call me a heretic, but inside you know I’m right. See also:
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Local Search & Maps
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InsideTrip Seeks To Add More Depth And Dimension To Travel Search – Entering the already competitive and crowded market for travel search, InsideTrip is betting it’s bringing enough value to the market to gain consumer awareness and usage. The site offers a metasearch engine (like Kayak or Farechase) for airfares. But it also has compiled public data on a range of other factors such as aircraft type and age, security wait time, routing quality, lost bags rank, and other criteria. These create a proprietary "overall trip quality" score. See also:
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Local SEM
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Local Business Listings: Dealing with Negative Reviews – Last month, I wrote about Why Local Businesses Should Be Like the Jerk, which examined the basics associated with businesses being listed in local listings and results. Now I want to take a look at the logical next consideration: How can businesses respond when they receive less-than-favorable reviews?
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Microsoft: adCenter
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Microsoft Launches adExcellence Program For UK Advertisers – The adCenter blog announced the launch of the Microsoft adExcellence program for UK advertisers today. In December 2007, Microsoft launched the program from US advertisers but today they rolled it out for UK advertisers. It provides advertisers "free training to help you become a Microsoft adCenter expert," says the adCenter blog. Once you are confident in your adCenter techniques, you can take the Microsoft adExcellence accreditation exam and be a certified adCenter accredited consultant. See also:
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Microsoft: Business Issues
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Official: Microsoft Management Reorg Announced; Dueling Ad Groups? – We expected a management shuffle from Microsoft today, and now they’ve delivered it. The company has announced seven new senior vice presidents and seven new corporate vice president. I’ll focus on the search and advertising front, where we now have two different senior vice presidents overseeing advertising. Best I can tell, one’s looking after search ads, and the other will pick up everything else. See also:
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Microsoft: Microhoo!
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Yahoo Celebrates Its 13th Birthday; Will There Be A 14th? – As Yahoo celebrates its 13th birthday, the looming question is: will the company be able to find an alternative to the Microsoft offer or will Steve Ballmer & Co. prevail? According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo has recently "stepped up" talks with AOL about potentially folding AOL’s business into Yahoo. See also:
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Microsoft: Mobile
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Microsoft Buys Danger - Microsoft has acquired Danger, Inc., maker of the T-mobile "Sidekick" device and the Danger operating system and platform. Danger has been hailed as highly innovative and its platform and OS pre-dates the iPhone (the company was founded in 2000). There’s a bit of an irony here in that Danger was co-founded by Andy Rubin, who is the chief architect behind Google’s Android, which is competing with Windows Mobile as a platform.
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Microsoft: Searching
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Microsoft Live Search Core Relevance Program Management Director Eytan Seidman Moves On - Eytan Seidman, Program Management Director over core relevance for Microsoft Live Search, is leaving Microsoft (and Seattle) after six and a half years and heading to New York to work on a start up with his brother. Vanessa Fox talks with him about life at Microsoft, the birth of Live Search, and singing karaoke in New Orleans. See also:
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Microsoft: SEO
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MSNbot 1.1: Live Search Implements A More Efficient Crawl – Today, Microsoft announced changes to their Live Search crawler intended to reduce bandwidth resources during the crawl of a site. MSNbot (upgraded to version 1.1) now supports both HTTP compression and conditional get. A look at how it works and similar features on other major search engines.
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Mobile Search
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Mobile Musical Chairs: Google Befriends Nokia; Yahoo Snags T-Mobile Europe – Coming out of the Mobile World Congress this morning are two major mobile search (and probably ad) deals involving Google and Yahoo. Yahoo appears to have replaced Google as the search provider for T-Mobile in Europe, and it also appears to be ousting T-Mobile search partner Medio Systems in Europe as well (the latter just announced an "on device portal" for T-Mobile USA). Google, for its part, has become a major search partner of Nokia, which is the world’s largest handset maker and controls 40 percent of the market. See also:
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Paid Search & Contextual
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The Secret Of Large Term Lists (It’s All In The Bidding) – Last Monday, in a SEL post discussing the click quality by engine, I mentioned in passing an 89% drop-off between ‘phrases tested’ and ‘phrases actively generating good clicks’. Specifically, we posted 176,903 terms en route to discovering 20,152 active good terms for a client. Today I’ll revisit that drop-off and analyze similar data from two other retailers. See also:
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Searching
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Hitwise: Google Users Older, Bigger Spenders Than Yahoo’s – Hitwise performed an interesting demographic analysis last week, comparing the breakdown of Google and Yahoo search users. What it found was that Google users skew older than Yahoo search users, bucking some of the conventional wisdom in the market about the relative composition of their audiences. Google users are also more likely to be affluent and have spent more online. See also:
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Search Marketing Industry
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Is The Time Ripe For Search Marketing Standards? – Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude plus faces a number of obstacles. But looking beyond these, I also see signs that we may be getting ready to establish standards. See also:
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Search Marketing Tactics
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Designing And Owning Your "Search Shelf Space" – Ever walk into a store to purchase something only to find it’s not there? You know what you want and you’re ready to buy, but you can’t find it. Bewildered, you paw through the shelves, searching high and low, but to no avail. Exasperated, you leave. Clearly, consumer expectations are very real, but keep in mind that they’re not limited to brick and mortar venues. Online consumers have the same expectations as their offline counterparts. Likewise, so do search users. In fact, people visiting a “search shelf”—a search results page—expect the same experience as people visiting a shelf in a retail store. See also:
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SEO / Natural / Unpaid Search
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Sitemaps.org Update: You Can Now Store Your XML Sitemap Files Anywhere! – The major search engines have announced an update to the sitemaps.org protocol which enables site owners to store their XML Sitemap files in any location — even on a different domain than the one referenced in the Sitemap. This will be a welcome change for those who manage multiple domains and would like to keep all Sitemap files in one place, as well as for those who would like to store their Sitemap in a location other than the root. See also:
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Security & Privacy
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Google, Yahoo, Microsoft & Other Search Engines Must Comply With EU Privacy Rules – European data privacy regulators said search engines outside the EU also have to comply with EU’s privacy regulations. The regulations require the search engines to require their users to consent to their data being collected. See also:
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Small Business
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Does Your Site Have Sex Appeal? – The secret’s out: men and women are different—in person and online. Gender differences matter in web design, content, and marketing. It takes more than a girlish color scheme and soft focus photos of smiling children to draw women to your site and earn their loyalty. Color and design matter, but so do content, safety, and service. And oh, by the way: men want compelling visuals and for you to just get to the point. Surprised? You shouldn’t be, as these research findings demonstrate. See also:
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Social Media
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The Inconvienent Truth About Social Media Marketing – Social media is hot. Everyone wants to be on Digg’s home page. Link baiting, especially using things like numbered lists, imperative rules or controversial hooks is the SEM strategy du jour. There’s just one — major — problem with spending so much time and effort on capturing the eyeballs of social media users. Social media traffic does not monetize. See also:
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Video Search
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Video Search Engine Optimization: Catering To The Masses – Video is easier to digest than ever before. High speed wired and wi-fi services, iPhones, and other video-enabled mobile devices are helping hungry users scarf down a smorgasbord of video treats. And publishers are going back to the kitchen to serve up more and more. How do publishers scale their operations to meet this seemingly insatiable appetite? And, how do they bake search engine friendliness into every serving? See also:
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Yahoo: Business Issues
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Yahoo Layoffs Happening Now – The expected Yahoo layoffs happened, and this recaps some of the many good people who were cut. Bradley Horowitz is the top-ranking search person to go, apparently leaving voluntarily to Google. See also:
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Yahoo: Local
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Yahoo Maps Adds More Data, Other Improvements – Yahoo Maps has announced a range of improvements. These include expanded global coverage, including better data and coverage of Eastern Europe; and, in the US, more "granular" neighborhood data for 300 cities and 12,000 neighborhoods. Functionality has been improved as well. Tiles are "lighter" for faster load times, colors and styles have been adjusted and there are several other visual improvements.
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Yahoo: Mobile
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Yahoo onePlace: Think Of It As MyYahoo For Mobile – This morning Yahoo announced a new mobile application called "onePlace." The application isn’t yet available but appears to be an elegant mobile bookmarking system that is highly customizable and features an RSS reader. It can accommodate any type of content: news feeds, web sites, videos, images, search queries. A shorthand way to think about it might be MyYahoo for mobile.
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Yahoo: Paid Search
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Minimum Bids In Yahoo About To Change – Yahoo announced that the minimum bid of $0.10 within the search network will no longer be a true minimum bid. Yahoo is changing it so that the minimum bids can be lower or higher than $0.10. This does not impact the content network. What makes a minimum bid go higher or lower? Two factors: (1) Value – the number of bidders and their bid amounts in a particular keyword market (2) Quality – the relevance of keywords, or how frequently users click on the ads associated with them relative to competing ads. See also:
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Yahoo: SEO
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Yahoo Announces "Search Monkey" Enhanced, Annotated Results At SMX West – Today, at the inaugural Search Marketing Expo West conference, Yahoo plans to unveil a project code-named "Search Monkey," a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific web sites. The new enhancements differ from Yahoo’s "Shortcuts" that sometimes appear at the top of search result pages. Shortcuts are served by Yahoo whenever the search engine is confident that the shortcut links are more relevant than the other web search results on the page. See also:
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Yahoo: Video
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Yahoo Live Launches - Online Video, Um, Live – Techmeme is all abuzz with news of the Yahoo Live launch. I’m thinking Yahoo’s doing online video? Again? But weren’t they closing Yahoo Video? No, that was Yahoo Podcasts — it’s hard to keep track of the closures. But still, what’s special about Live? Then I hit the official Yahoo blog post about it and it all became clear (and potentially cool). Yahoo Live lets you broadcast live video. See also:
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Yahoo: Other
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Yahoo Buzz Launches: Votes, Searches, & Emails Used To Rank News – As expected, Yahoo Buzz has now launched — a site where "buzz-worthy" news articles are highlighted based on user votes, searching activity, and email sharing. Hot stories on Buzz may also get featured on the Yahoo home page, an added incentive to get publishers considering the program.
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Fun, Weird Stuff & Other Things
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Google-Funded Lunar X Prize Aims To Put Private Rover On Moon – Ten teams have entered teh Google-funded Lunar X Prize. It seeks to award $20 million to the first scientific team that can land a privately funded robot on the moon and meet a number of other criteria (explore terrain and relay results back to Earth). See also:
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