Local search results are great for B2B if your physical location is in the middle of the city you serve—and your prospects actually use search terms that include the name of your city. But what if you serve a broader region (e.g., Northern California)? Or what if your office is in a smaller town and […]
When you buy search services, some agencies merely provide a general overview of their SEO methodology without revealing any details. They claim this relieves the client from being bogged down in the minutiae of implementation. In reality though, these firms are simply trying to keep their intellectual property under wraps and create a dependence for […]
The Google Online Marketing challenge seeks to turn college and business school students into search marketers (in most cases local). We wrote about it when the program was announced. Google says that there are now 724 teams in the US (two weeks before the competition begins) and there appear to be many around the globe […]
Did you know you could get some tasty food from Yahoo? Well, not Yahoo the search company, but Ya-Hoo! the baking company at YahooBakingCo.com. Notice, part of the Ya-Hoo! name is the exclamation point at the end. The main difference between Yahoo! and Ya-Hoo! is the hyphen separating “Ya” and “Hoo.” In the footer of […]
Another Media Exec Leaves Yahoo from the New York Times blog reports Vince Broady, a senior vice president of Yahoo’s entertainment business, is leaving the company. The article shows how media executives at Yahoo have been leaving one after another. Maybe it is Yahoo streamlining? Maybe it is a difference of opinion between the media […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog has posted a Sitemaps FAQs blog post. In this blog post, Google responds to some of the most asked questions on the Sitemaps protocol and how Google supports it. Some of the questions include:
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
How can you increase your chances of appealing to an average Digger, Stumbler, or other social media user, and actually get them to vote for your content? Consider this quote from John Maynard Keynes, British born economist responsible for Keynesian economics, who explains how markets work by making an analogy to a beauty contest: “It […]
I was casually chatting with a super-savvy Web 2.0 friend – we’ll call him Mac – about a website I work closely with. We’d spent the last year overhauling the strategy and the design of the site, though there are still several features waiting to be built, and the content growth is just at the […]
What does mobile computing, that online all the time phenom of the future, look like, and how soon will we have ubiquitous mobile search? Apple Chairman Steve Jobs offered some serious clues in his keynote address here in San Francisco at MacWorld this morning.
On Thursday, January 17, Christine Churchill, president of KeyRelevance, will discuss “How to Select a Paid Search Management Application.” As paid search continues to be the largest segment of online advertising, it’s also become more complex and competitive—and difficult to manage. If you’re still trying to manage paid search using spreadsheets, you might want to […]
When it comes to SEO, there are certain elements that need to be in place for any newly-designed website. Have 301 redirects been put into place? Is the robots.txt file authored to allow adequate crawling? This week’s infographic depicts a handy checklist that will help get you through any new site launch or transition:
I can imagine two possible consumer reactions to MediaCart, a smart shopping cart that offers video displays, personalized services, and targeted advertising to shoppers in retail stores: amazement or horror. Microsoft has teamed up with MediaCart to offer in-store ad targeting that is both behavioral and takes the concept of “location-based services” to the store […]
Google PageRank Directory Clanger by Andy Beard informs us that Google recently pushed out an update to the Google Directory on the 8th of January. What that means is that Google pulled the most recent ODP RDF dump file and updated the Google Directory with that file. But more importantly, Andy also notes that the […]
Google has been showcasing its primaries mapplets, which offer results breakdowns by candidate and county, as well as other information (e.g., video). The Google LatLong blog now posts about how the candidates, campaign staffers, and other third parties are using the Google Maps and Maps API to showcase their messages and organize political volunteers and […]
The US Federal Communications Commission has approved 214 “qualified bidders” for the forthcoming 700MHz wireless spectrum auction. Among the bidders are Google and wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and MetroPCS. According to this Bloomberg report, the government expectation is that the spectrum licenses may raise as much as $15 billion.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
On Friday, Search Engine Land published a piece about the Wired How To wiki, and how easy it was to gain a link from it. Our piece — which I gave the go ahead to — generated some serious spam issues for Wired, generated discord within the search marketing community, and injured the search marketing […]
With certain linking strategies under fire and others frowned on by the search engines, I thought I’d focus on what links do count and share how and where I find them. The short answer to the question “what works” is: they all do. All the link building tactics we’re fond of jeering at still work; […]
The introduction of satellite images into map search interfaces has excited both virtual sightseers and local app developers. Further innovations like Google’s Street View have caused consternation from privacy advocates while further pumping up the buzz about online mapping. In 2008, we can expect further innovations that stretch the envelope while dynamic map interfaces solidify […]
MacWorld starts today in San Francisco, and there probably won’t be any announcement to equal the iPhone, which continues to reverberate across the mobile landscape. Google, in particular, continues to reap dividends from its suite of iPhone apps, a new version of which is launching today according to both the NY Times and CNet. The […]
Stake Is Bought in IAC/InterActiveCorp from the New York Times reports Liberty Media Corporation purchased an additional 14 million shares in IAC/Interactive Corp, the parent company of Ask.com. The 14 million shares came out to about $339.5 million, but have given Liberty Media Corporation about a 30 percent stake in IAC. Liberty Media Corporation purchased […]
Google AdSense Has The Power To Lower Your Stock Price from paidContent reports IncrediMail, an email marketer based in Israel, has been banned by AdSense. The ban seemed to have caused their stock price to drop 45% in one day. IncrediMail did not say why they were banned. Was the 45% drop in the stock […]
Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia from The Argus reports that Professor Tara Brabazon from the University of Brighton has banned the use of Google and Wikipedia in her classroom. She said using Google and Wikipedia doesn’t encourage students to use their “own brains” enough. She added: I want students to sit down […]
Isabel Aguilera abandona la dirección de Google España y Portugal from ElPasis.com reports Google Spain and Portugal’s CEO, Isabel Aguilera, is leaving her position at Google as of January 15th. She became Google Spain’s CEO on March 1, 2006. A translated version of the article has Google’s regional director Southern Europe, Mr. Carduner, saying: Elizabeth […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
TechCrunch is reporting comScore data that shows AOL’s new finance site (which we wrote about here) passing Yahoo Finance and MSN Money to become the internet’s top finance destination. If these traffic numbers are accurate, it would be a very striking development — especially beating out Yahoo, which has held the top finance position seemingly […]
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.
President of the Microsoft Business Division, Jeff Raikes, is retiring and will be succeeded in that same role at the end of the month by Juniper Networks’ COO Stephen Elop. The Business Division controls Microsoft Office, Unified Communications, and Microsoft Business Solutions. The announcement comes a day after news of Microsoft M&A chief Bruce Jaffe’s […]
TechCrunch noticed that Yahoo has moved the FareChase metasearch engine to the homepage of Yahoo Travel. TechCrunch attributes this move to the recent nearly $200 million acquistion of SideStep by competitor Kayak. I’ve always thought that FareChase was a very strong property that wasn’t being fully leveraged by Yahoo. Yahoo acquired FareChase in 2004.
This Sunday night, one of the “60 Minutes” segments on CBS will feature an interview with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. There’s a snippet of the interview on the CBS website together with an article that previews the segment. In the video excerpt of the interview Zuckerberg looks uncomfortable as Lesley Stahl asks him […]
Just before New Year’s, I published a fictional look at what might happen to Google if it was forced to breakup due to government regulation. In The Search Party this week from The New Yorker, there’s a nice long look by author Ken Auletta on how such efforts to regulate Google might be developing in […]
Some SEOs were saddened when Wikipedia added nofollows to external links. Perhaps they’ll perk up to discover that Wired’s semi-Wikipedia challenger has no such blocking. NOTE FROM DANNY: We’ve talked with Wired about the situation, and they are putting a robots.txt block on links coming out of the wiki so that links won’t pass credit. […]
Yahoo Serving Images in Sponsored Search Listings from Search Engine Journal reports the Yahoo Directory is displaying image ads near the sponsored results. The images appear on the left hand side of each sponsored result within the directory pages. The images appear to be hosted by ImageAdvantage and draw your eyes to those ads. For […]
The Google Checkout blog announced that they have launched Google Checkout Trends. Google Checkout Trends is a flavor of Google Trends, but limits the data to that collected from Google Checkout merchants. It basically shows you what people are buying and selling online via Google Checkout. You can plug in one keyword or several keywords […]
In part 1 of Understanding Search Usability, I looked at search usability and the wide variety of search behaviors it addresses. SEO professionals tend to focus on query-related behavior, and web site usability professionals tend to focus on browsing behaviors. When both groups open their eyes and realize that all of these search behaviors are […]
I think one of the most significant problems small businesses have when it comes to growth is that they maintain a small business mindset. Now if you’re one of those that likes being “mom and pop,” then this article isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you’re a small business owner that has big […]
Almost since its mainstream introduction in the 1940s and 1950s, television has been the dominant mass medium. Today, television ad revenues in the US are estimated to be between $60 and $70 billion. But the internet, like cable TV and DVRs before it, is shaking up the industry and fundamentally changing consumer behavior. There are […]
The agenda is now up for our first SphinnCon internet marketing event — SphinnCon Israel, to be held on February 5 in Jerusalem. Below, more about the inaugural event and details about the low-cost networking series that is backed by Search Engine Land’s forum site, Sphinn. The idea behind SphinnCon is simple. Many readers know […]
Real estate may be slumping in the real world, but online the opposite is true. Zillow and Trulia in particular have been driving lots of change and innovation in the online real estate segment. Yesterday Trulia released a free publisher platform. And last night Zillow made several announcements. Among them, the Seattle-based site is formally […]