Search Month: March 2007 Search News, In Review

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 written last month, then a major story for various search marketing topics along with other stories related to those topics.

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Search Engine Land News
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Last month, Search Engine Land added three new columns to our existing line-up. We also posted the results of our reader survey, giving you an idea of who visits the web site. Finally, the program for our very first Search Marketing Expo event, SMX Advanced, was also posted. The show happens in Seattle this June 4 & 5. Aimed at intermediate-to-advanced search marketers, the program has debates, summits, tips & tactics sessions and several networking events. There are only a limited number of tickets, so register early. More on the show and other Search Engine Land news in the links below:

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Our Top 10 Most Popular Stories
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1) Google Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases – Hurray! Finally, you can get a report from Google of the top anchor text phrases used when people link to your site. Google Webmaster Central has just announced the new feature. But didn’t Google already report anchor text data? Yes, but only keywords, not phrases. Keywords are mostly useless junk food data. Phrases are datalicious, tasty and helpful. Below, a detailed and illustrated look at what a difference a phrase makes and how to claim your own.

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2) Google Warning Against Letting Your Search Results Get Indexed – The days of doing a Google search that brings up results leading to search results from other sites are heading for a close. Matt Cutts, in his Search Results In Search Results post today, points out a change to Google’s guidelines that shows a crackdown on this type of material may begin. More about what I’m talking about below, plus the question of whether Google should do the same with paid listings. Over time, more and more pages seem to show up in Google search results that are merely lists of search results from those sites. To illustrate this, consider a search for dvd players:

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3) Dissecting Microsoft Slams At Google As Copyright Infringer – Last October, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer gave us a taste of how Microsoft was going to position Google as a copyright leech. Today, Microsoft launched a full-out assault on the company. Google deserves some of this, no doubt. But the idea as Microsoft as some altruistic copyright savior deserves some critical analysis, as well. Below, I’ll dissect Microsoft’s slams against Google, pointing out where they can be redirected back at Microsoft itself. But overall, I remain in agreement that Google should shift book search to an opt-in basis when dealing with copyrighted works.

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4) The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth – One thing that has plagued the SEO industry for years has been a lack of consistency when it comes to SEO terms and definitions. One of the most prevalent misnomers being bandied about is the phrase "duplicate content penalty." I’m here to tell you that there is no such thing as a search engine penalty for duplicate content. At least not the way many people believe there is. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that the search engines like and appreciate duplicate content — they don’t. But they don’t specifically penalize websites that happen to have some duplicate content. Duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of the Web. It’s nothing to be afraid of. If your site has some dupe content for whatever reason, you don’t have to lose sleep every night worrying about the wrath of the Google gods. They’re not going to shoot lightning bolts at your site from the sky, nor are they going to banish your entire website from ever showing up when someone searches for what you offer. The duplicate content probably won’t show up in searches, but that’s not the same thing as a penalty. Let me explain.

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5) Google’s Matt Cutts on Personalization and the Future of SEO – Last week I talked with Google’s Marissa Mayer about the user side of personalization. This week I had the chance to sit down with Matt Cutts at the Googleplex and asked him what the impact of personalization will be on the SEO community. One thing that was interesting in the Marissa Mayer interview was finding out just how much impact personalization would have for most of us in our Google search experience. The fact is, right now, personalization won’t make that much of a difference in many of our searches.

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6) Google: Click Fraud Is 0.02% Of Clicks – Finally, we have a click fraud rate from Google itself: less than 0.02 percent of all clicks slip past its filters and are caught after advertisers request reviews. That low figure is sure to bring out the critics who will disagree. Below, more about how Google comes up with the figure plus some click fraud fighting initiatives it plans to implement later this year.

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7) The 5 Secrets PPC Agencies Don’t Want You to Know – Nearly three-fourths of companies that outsource their pay-per-click search marketing to agencies are dissatisfied with their results, and only 21 percent are completely satisfied, according to a Jupiter Research published late last year. What causes this dissatisfaction, especially for B2B marketers? There are five factors at work:

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8) Digg’s Kevin Rose Fails To Stop The Bury Brigade – After a week of questions about Digg’s "Bury Brigade," Digg founder Kevin Rose has come in with some public comments about the system and the "alleged" brigade. Unfortunately, they’re just comments — not solutions to protect Digg from the actual brigade I myself can see. More about that in the article below, plus how buries work and can be misused.

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9) Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads – Google announced a limited U.S. only beta for a new service they are calling Pay Per Action ads. Google Pay Per Action will allow advertisers to create ads that cost only when a desired action is triggered. The advertiser sets the price per action; for example, an advertiser can decide to pay $5 per lead acquisition, as opposed to paying per click or per impression. These Pay Per Action ads are available to a limited number of AdSense publishers. Publishers will be able to select which Pay Per Action ads they would like to display on their content sites. A publisher accepted into the beta can choose to display all pay per action ads, or select to show keyword specific ads or select a specific ad from a specific advertiser. To do so, the publisher will have to login to their AdSense accounts, go to the referrals section and select other referrals from the options.

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10) UFO Crawler: The Truth Is Out There & Searchable – IBM and Yahoo teamed up to bring to you UFOCrawler, a search engine that is about finding sources on "UFO Sightings, time travel, conspiracy theories and anomalies." For example, a search on area 51 returns 7,904 sources, unfortunately some of the results do not look all that great. It is important to note that all the other tabbed searches (i..e Web Images Video Audio Directory Local News) take you to Yahoo, the Enterprise tab takes you to UFOCrawler results. This is powered by IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise and brought to you by the Anomalies Network.

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Ask.com
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Ask On Ad Campaign: Fun Way To Wake The "Sleep Searchers" – I wrote earlier about Ask’s guerrilla marketing campaign now underway to raise awareness of the search engine in the UK. I’ve now talked with Ask CEO Jim Lanzone, who explained more about how the campaign is designed to unfold. He said it’s all meant in good fun, not to be negative about Google, but rather to wake "sleep searchers" up to the choices they have in search. And I have to agree — when you understand more about what’s planned, it is pretty funny. See also:

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Ask: City
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Ask City’s Shape Search Tool For Local Search Results – The Ask.com Blog announced a neat new feature that enables you to literally shape your own local search results. You can go to Ask City, locate a location, draw a circle or square in a certain location and then search specifically within that location. See also:

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B2B
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Studies: B-to-B Search Is Poised For Continued Growth – A close look at recent market studies sheds some light on what’s happening in the world of business-to-business marketing, and provides several interesting insights regarding search marketing. It appears that business marketers’ perceptions are changing and as a result—budgets are starting to shift. See also:

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Business & Revenues
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Comparing Search Popularity Ratings: Google Climbs & Good News For Live.com - Previously, I’ve covered individually the latest search popularity figures for February 2007 in the United States that have been issued by the major ratings services of comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings, Hitwise and Compete. Now it’s time to compare the figures from each of these services against each other plus look back over the past year, to see if there’s any agreement on which search engines are winning and losing the search wars. The short story is that Google continues to rise and Microsoft’s Live.com, after months of drops, gets some good news in a flattening off or actual gain in share, depending on which service you look at. See also:

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Google: AdSense
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AdSense Publisher View Of Google Pay Per Action – Last week Google launched Pay Per Action in beta version for some AdSense publishers and AdWords advertisers. I logged into my Google AdSense account this morning, and noticed that my referrals section was redone to allow me to start placing Google Pay Per Action referrals on my site. Below, I will take you through a screen by screen view of Pay Per Action from the Google AdSense publisher side of things. See also:

Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads

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Google: AdWords
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Google: Click Fraud Is 0.02% Of Clicks – Finally, we have a click fraud rate from Google itself: less than 0.02 percent of all clicks slip past its filters and are caught after advertisers request reviews. That low figure is sure to bring out the critics who will disagree. Below, more about how Google comes up with the figure plus some click fraud fighting initiatives it plans to implement later this year. See also:

When AdWords Gets Sex Wrong

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Google: Acquisitions
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GOOG Acquisitions: Trendalyzer & Adscape Media – A quick heads-up on two new Google acquisitions. First, Google has announced the purchase of Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software. Second, it confirms the purchase of Adscape Media, an in-game advertising company, following rumors of a buy last month. See also:

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Google: Local
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Google Local Business Center Adds Photos, Attributes, Maps Corrections & Stats - The Google Local Business Center has just added four new features for business owners who want to maintain a Google Local Business listing. Below, a step-by-step guide to how you can adjust the marker for your business, add a photo to your listing, add custom attributes and see statistics on how your listing is performing. See also:

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Google: Non-Search Ads
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NY Times Tracks Google’s Traditional Media Efforts – Miguel Helft at the New York Times has a relatively long and interesting article, with some interesting details, that rounds up the status and mixed results (so far) of Google’s moves into radio, TV and print newspapers. From my understanding, the print newspaper ads have been the most successful to date. See also:

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Google: Maps
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Google Responds To Katrina Controversy With Fresh New Orleans Images – The Google Blog has responded to the concerns about showing pre-Katrina images for New Orleans. In short, Google said they changed the imagery back in September 2006 to provide higher resolution images of the city, even though views were from before Hurricane Katrina caused widespread damage. Now those pre-Katrina images have been replaced with high resolution photos shot in 2006, done on an expedited basis, the company said. See also:

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Google: Revenues
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The "Is Google Too Powerful" Question Raised Once Again – Is Google Too Powerful? from BusinessWeek is a fresh look at an old topic on Google’s continued growth and power. See also:

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Google: SEO Issues
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The Pros & Cons Of Personalized Search – In the past two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to talk to both Marissa Mayer and Matt Cutts about the impact of personalization at Google. While the initial storm following Google’s announcement seems to be dying down somewhat, the ripple effects can still be felt throughout the SEM industry. In this column, I wanted to take a look at some of the criticism that has come out about personalization and provide my view on why personalization is the logical next step for search. See also:

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Google: Searching
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Google Tests Top Of Page Navigation Links – Google Operating System reports that Google is testing a new interface for how they currently display the navigation links at Google.com. Google moved the links that used to be directly above the search box to the very top of the page. See also:

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Google: Mobile
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Google Upgrades Mobile Search With More Content – Google, appearing to respond to Yahoo oneSearch and other competitive challenges, has upgraded its WAP-based search to incorporate more data and information into results. There also appear to be some interesting personalization features. See also:

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Google: Video & YouTube
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The Big Viacom Sues GOOG & YouTube Roundup – Yesterday, news came out about Viacom suing Google for $1 billion over alleged video copyright infringement on YouTube. With some dust settling, I thought it would be helpful to recap some of the analysis out there. I’m pulling this roundup mostly from coverage you’ll find on Techmeme. Come along, and we’ll go through the official company statements from both sides, the actual case, the importance of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s "safe harbor" provision and how Viacom scoured YouTube to build its case. See also:

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Google: Other Products
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Google Offers ‘Themes’ For Personalized Homepage – Tonight, Google went public with "themes" (skins) for its personalized homepage. See also:

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Google: Other Stuff
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President Jimmy Carter Speaks at Google’s Atlanta Office – President Jimmy Carter gave the welcoming remarks for Google Atlanta’s Open House Thursday. President Carter stated that his life has been transformed by Google, and that it would be hard to find many people in the developed world for whom that statement isn’t true. See also:

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Legal
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Google Wins KinderStart Case Over Site Penalty – Eric Goldman reports that Google has won the case brought against them by KinderStart over Google downgrading their rankings. See also:

Court: Google Suggest Feature Not Responsible For Encouraging Software Piracy

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Link Building
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Getting Link Love From Google Custom Search Engines – I’ve written previously about Google Custom Search Engines. These vertical Googlettes let anyone create a search engine with results based on Google’s index, with an added layer of human editorial selection. Put more simply, you create a Google CSE; you select the sites you want in it, and then you let anyone search your CSE from your site. New Google CSEs appear almost daily. You can see examples at Google here, and there’s even a directory of them being maintained here. Google CSEs offer a couple link building opportunities, one of which might be described as affinity linking.

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Local Search
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How Much Is ‘Local Search’ Really Worth? – Journalists and financial analysts keep asking the question, "When will local search finally take off?" By that they mean ad spending. After all, locally targeted advertising in traditional media such as newspapers, yellow pages, radio, outdoor, direct mail, spot cable/TV and coupons easily exceeds $100 billion annually in the U.S. And consumers have already embraced local search—or at least the search for local information online. See also:

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Microsoft: Business Issues
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Microsoft Appoints New Head Of Search & Ads – Microsoft has appointed Satya Nadella to head the newly formed Search and Ad Platform Group at Microsoft. Kevin Johnson, the president of Microsoft’s Platform Services Division, will be Satya Nadella’s boss. Nadella will start his new role on April 19th. See also:

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Microsoft: Mobile
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Microsoft’s Tellme Acquisition ‘Accelerates’ Mobile Search Competition - Notwithstanding Microsoft’s own existing speech assets, the Tellme acquisition appears to be complementary and strategic for Microsoft across the board. There were the four principal areas, identified in the release, that would be pursued or enhanced by the acquisition: unified communications, speech platform, software plus services and mobile services and search. See also:

TellMe: Is Microsoft Shadow Boxing Against Google In Mobile Voice Search?

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Microsoft: Partnerships
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Microsoft Inks Distribution Deal With Lenovo – Buyers of Lenovo computers, including ThinkPad notebooks, ThinkCentre desktops, Lenovo 3000 PCs and Lenovo-brand PCs available in China will soon have Windows Live software and and Windows Live Toolbar preinstalled on their machines. See also:

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Microsoft: SEO Issues
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Live Search To Offer Webmaster Tools Section Soon? – Eytan Seidman of Live Search responded to the recent questions on why the Live.com link command went offline. He said it was primarily due to "mass automated usage for data mining." So they have decided to block all queries with backlink operators for the time being. Eytan adds that they hope to bring this functionality back "in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries." To me, this is a sign that Microsoft is working on a webmaster tools section, similar to what Google has with Webmaster Central and what Yahoo has with Site Explorer. See also:

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Mobile Search
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Google Partners With LG & Mobile Handset Maker Deal Chart – Google has gained another mobile phone handset partnership, this time with LG. As of the second quarter of this year, selected LG handsets shipped throughout the world will be preloaded with mobile versions of Google software, including Google Maps, Gmail and Blogger. Yahoo signed a similar deal with LG in February. It’ll be interesting to see if both companies will now have preinstalled apps on the same phones. As John Battelle notes, we’re in a new round of handset distribution wars. To help, I’ll summarize who is where in a chart below. See also:

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Paid Search & Contextual
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Paid Search Back-Checks, Slays Dragons, Asks for Little in Return – Paid search might not seem sexy, but it performs. A little respect for this "all around" player of search marketing. See also:

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Privacy
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Google Anonymizing Search Records To Protect Privacy – Google has announced that it will now anonymize the server log data that it collects after 18 to 24 months, as a way to better protect the privacy of its users. Until now, Google has retained server log data in its original form indefinitely, which made it possible for anyone with access to those logs — such as government agencies possibly gaining them through legal processes — to potentially track queries back to users. I’m going to revisit what Google collects in its server logs to explain how that can — and cannot — be used to track information back to an particular user. Then I’ll also recap some of the other places where search history is retained, since it isn’t only within server logs. See also:

Google Searches Used In Murder Trial

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Search Marketing Industry
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SEMPO Elects 2007 Officers – SEMPO has announced the new officers elected by the 2007 SEMPO Board of Directors Announced. Each officer will serve a one-year term and here they are: Gord Hotchkiss, Chairperson; Jeffrey Pruitt, President; Dave Williams, Vice President; Dave Fall, Treasurer; Chris Boggs, Secretary. Congrats to the new board! See also:

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SEO & SEM
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Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More – Last week, I covered a new command for the meta robots tag — one to prevent search engines from using Yahoo titles and descriptions. In doing that, a number of questions came up about the meta robots tag syntax itself. Google Webmaster Central has now posted "Using the robots meta tag," providing some clarity from Google. In addition, both Yahoo and Microsoft have also sent me information on using the tag. I’ll run through what everyone says below, complete with charts for easy at-a-glance comparisons. See also:

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Small Business SEM
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Survival of the Nimble – I bend but do not break. Those six words, penned by poet Jean de La Fontaine in 1668, describe one of the most important strengths of a small business: The ability to be flexible. This ability to react rapidly is one of the most important differences in small versus large companies. Our search world is undergoing changes of tidal-wave proportion. One only needs to look around to see increased search complexity. In a world where change is dramatic, those who can adapt to the new conditions quickest have the best chances for success. "Survival of the fittest" has evolved into "survival of the nimble." Small businesses and their collective ability to bend finally have a chance against the link-monger orporations online. The sooner the small business owner realizes this strength the sooner she/he can exploit it. See also:

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Social Media
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Top 12 Ways To Win Friends & Write Magnetic Headlines – As a consultant who specializes in social media, I’ve learned one of the most powerful tools in gaining readers is the title or headline of your stories. Crafting a title that grabs someone’s eye, gets them to stop scanning and pay attention to your story rather than reading another one is a critical first step. See also:

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Video Search
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NBC & News Corp’s "OverTube" Not A YouTube-Killer — It Might Just Power Those - I’ve been traveling the past three days so am catching up on news — including that of the new supposed YouTube-killer being launched by NBC Universal & News Corp. But while the official release calls this a new "site" coming later this year, more reading makes it clear we’re talking about a video distribution network that will be anything but a rival to YouTube. In fact, it could even distribute video to YouTube, if the new company decides there’s money to be made there. Below, a rundown on how it seems likely to work and the existing partners that will carry the content. See also:

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Yahoo: Answers
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Yahoo Adds Networking Features To Answers – Yahoo has added a social networking feature to its Answers service, allowing you to add Yahoo Answers users to your own personal collection of contacts, providing direct access to the questions they ask, answer, and star on Answers.

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Yahoo: Business Issues
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Yahoo’s Semel Says Panama Will Show "Exciting Numbers" In 1st Quarter – Yahoo CEO praises new ad system, says "very happy" from Reuters reports that Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said at an AdAge conference that Yahoo’s new "Panama" ad system, will result in "some very exciting numbers" for the first quarter. "I’m totally all smiles," Semel said about Panama. He restated that Yahoo’s "intention is to close the gap and Panama is doing a great job." See also:

Yahoo China Sued For Linking To Unlicensed Music

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Yahoo: Mobile
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Yahoo Pushes oneSearch To Most Mobile Phones – Yahoo’s oneSearch for mobile phones, previously only available on a select few devices, is now available for more than 85% of all web-enabled mobile phones. See also:

Yahoo Launches Mobile Ad Network & Mobile Publisher Services

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Yahoo: Paid Search
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Yahoo Appoints New Click Quality Czar – I’ve always believed that click fraud was a bigger PR problem than actual problem for the search engines. Of course there have been raging debates about the percentage of "invalid clicks" that advertisers were receiving and what the click fraud numbers actually are. But the engines historically took the "black box" position that they were dealing with the problem and working diligently to address it. But they also tended to address it reactively via litigation rather than getting out "in front" of the issue – at least in public. Last August, the IAB and search engines came together to jointly form a group to create click quality standards and address the issue of click fraud as an industry. And now Yahoo has smartly appointed Reggie Davis as "Vice President of Marketplace Quality." See also:

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Yahoo: SEO Issues
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Yahoo Quick Links: The Official Word – Yahoo Quick Links are little links found beneath some of the search results at Yahoo Search. As an example, a search on barry schwartz at Yahoo Search brings up a Wikipedia entry for the other Barry Schwartz with Quick Links; it looks like this: I have been covering Yahoo Quick Links for a while and got some official answers from Yahoo about how they work. In short, Yahoo Quick Links can happen through both natural and paid means. See also:

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Yahoo: Other
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Yahoo Mail To Offer Free Unlimited Email Storage – Yahoo announced that they will be offering "unlimited email storage starting in May 2007" to everyone. The announcement also gives a wonderful historical roundup of Yahoo Mail’s almost 10 year history.

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Search Engine Reviews & Mentions
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eTools.ch: "Swiss Army" Meta Search Engine – I’m generally not a big fan of meta search technologies—I prefer to go directly to the search service I feel will likely give me the best response for any given query, rather than sifting through the aggregated results from several engines. But recently, developer Stephan Schmid invited me to kick the tires on his Switzerland-based meta search engine eTools.ch, and after playing around with it a bit I came away impressed.

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PreFound Relaunches, Tries To Rise Above Social Search Din – The term "social search" is kind of a catch-all category now for a range of companies that are bringing people back into the algorithm. Not only are these companies seeking to improve search results with humans, they’re trying to differentiate vs. Google from a marketing standpoint on that basis as well. Eurekster, ChaCha, Jimmy Wales’ Wikia Search and PreFound are just four among many examples. These companies are all doing interesting things but there’s a kind of "noise" now that creates a marketing challenge for anyone competing in the space. Trying to rise above that din, PreFound relaunched yesterday with a new UI, new and improved personalization tools and a new push to gain attention in the market.

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Q&A With François Bourdoncle, CEO Of Exalead – Exalead is one of those great search engines that most people haven’t heard of. And that’s a shame, because it offers some really powerful and unique features that most information professionals love. Exalead is also the name of an enterprise search company, co-founded by today’s Q&A participant, François Bourdoncle. Working on web technologies from the very early days, he co-founded Exalead in 2000 with the goal of revolutionizing the search engine software market by providing users with a unified technology platform to access information in the enterprise. Exalead.com, the web search engine, showcases the company’s capabilities in search. Francois and Exalead also play a key role in the development of the government-funded pan-European search engine Quaero, which has had its share of controversy. Read on for our Q&A…

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Summize: Using Heatmaps In Product Search Results – I wrote earlier this week about Wize a shopping comparison engine that aggregated millions of reviews to compile a "WizeRank" for each product, based on the total number of positive, neutral or negative reviews found on the web. Today Alex Iskold over on ReadWriteWeb takes a takes a look at Summize, a shopping search engine that also aggregates product reviews from Amazon, but presents product sentiment in a highly visual way using heatmaps. Positive ratings are green, negative are red, with a spectrum of color between them showing how strongly reviewers and consumers feel about a product. Another interesting approach to harnessing the collective opinion of the web to help us make purchasing decisions.

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TimeSearch: Searching Through History – TimeSearch is an interestingly different search engine, since the focus is just on time, as one may expect from the name. It’s the brainchild of Bamber Gascoigne, (a well known British television presenter of historical programmes and academic quiz shows) and HistoryWorld. The search options are fairly limited – to geographic areas of the world, themes (such as art, politics, science and so on), with the option of further limiting to specific sites such as the British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and so on. The searcher then pops into the search box the year they are interested in and TimeSearch responds with a timeline starting at that date and extending for about a year.

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Topix Transforms Into Community Generated Local News Site – This evening Topix is doing something entirely logical and taking a big risk at the same time. The site, which has been a "top 25" news destination, is now effectively flipping its model and going from being a news aggregator with comments and community at the margins to a community generated local news site with wire service feeds. It effectively creates a news blog for every zip in the United States. And Topix seeks human writers to help create and edit those local news pages.

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Wize Up For Better Product Reviews – Although most retail commerce still takes place offline in brick and mortar stores, most people use the web to research products before buying. And product reviews, whether from professionals or consumers who’ve actually bought and used products, can be a big help in making the right decision (or avoiding a wrong one). Product reviews have been staples at online retail sites for years. You can also find them on product comparison engines like Become.com or Yahoo shopping. There are also sites that specialize in aggregating reviews, such as Epinions, ConsumerSearch and ConsumerReview.com. In the past, I’ve found myself jumping around between these and other sites, never fully satisfied with the experience. Sometimes it was because the reviews didn’t have enough information. Other times, reviews seemed biased or fabricated. Lately I’ve been using Wize, a product search engine with several unique features that make it an excellent starting point for product research. Wize has aggregated more than 1.2 million reviews, from both experts and users, drawn from more than 6,300 web sites that feature reviews.

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ZoomInfo Offers Free Company Profiles – ZoomInfo today launched its Business Information Search Engine, a service that offers information on more than 3.5 million companies. Although the company profiles are similar to those offered by Hoovers.com and other subscription-based providers, ZoomInfo business profiles are free.

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Have A Laugh!
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Search Funnies: The April Fool’s 2007 Roundup – April Fools Day was yesterday, and the search engines along with others in the search world, went all out. Here is a roundup of the different pranks played. See also:

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Search Month: March 2007 Search News, In Review

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