For the past two weeks, I feel like I’ve been witnessing some type of Cuban Missile Crisis going on between Google, Twitter and Facebook. I’d like to suggest some ways that social-nuclear war might be averted. Beyond Blame, Believing In Cooperation Let’s set aside blame, because blame isn’t going to move anything forward. Let’s also […]
Today at the Online News Association conference, Google introduced a new link rel attribute that news organizations can use to mark their best work. You can mark up to seven pieces of content per week. Google News will use this information as a signal for labeling news stories as “featured” on the Google News home […]
Google is encouraging TV show owners/providers to begin tagging their online videos with several new fields that can be used in both video sitemaps and mRSS feeds. The new fields include specific data for identifying the show/series title, season and episode numbers, premiere date and more. Google’s blog post explains and shows the correct code […]
In a bid to improve the consumer experience with Google Product Search listings, the search giant will soon be requiring three new types of data for feeds targeting the U.S., and one new type for those targeting the U.K. A fourth type of data, which is recommended, but not required, will allow merchants to specify […]
News was broken this weekend about new Facebook “like” functionality that will replace the traditional Facebook share buttons. The change beefed up the visibility of people’s “likes” by adding thumbnails, and meta data form Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol: This means that getting a page on your website “liked” will now be featured in the stream […]
With the amount of content published online seeming to expand dramatically every year, Google says it’s experimenting with two new meta tags that it hopes will help it identify the original sources of online content. They’re called syndication-source and original-source and here’s a look at what they do and how publishers can use them. What […]
This is the year in which we will see video grow from a “frill” some businesses occasionally include on their websites, to an essential, competitive differentiator that drives SEO and increases brand identification. Knowledgeable companies have already embraced this shift and made video a central part of their online offerings. The most advanced have found […]
I attended the F8 Facebook developer event this morning and might have live blogged it but the public WiFi connection was extremely slow. Maybe that’s a good thing; aspects of what were announced had me confused, especially the privacy issues raised by the announcements. I’m not a developer and this event was geared toward them; […]
Last week at the Chirp conference, Twitter announced three big initiatives that have the potential to collectively rock the world of local marketing:
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that you can use a Sitemaps extension to provide image data to Google. In the Sitemaps file you can specify the following properties of the images; image, location, caption, geographic location, title and license details. More technical specifications can be seen over here and here is a sample Google […]
I was sitting in the mobile app panel at SMX West when the subject turned to “augmented reality.” Some great live blogging of the presentation by Cindy Krum is on her RankMobile site. Augmented reality is basically presenting some kind of digital overlay on top of a view of the “real world.” Think about what […]
Google has made a series of announcements today about its Custom Search Engine service, including a new integration with Wikipedia that substantially changes the search experience on that site for users who opt-in. Other Custom Search announcements today include new custom themes and layouts, as well as better support for “rich snippets.” More on those […]
It may have a search box and look like a video search engine but Clicker is not according to CEO and co-founder Jim Lanzone. In a way this may seem like a strange position to take given that Lanzone was the very partisan CEO of search engine Ask. But while Clicker does index video it […]
Yahoo! recently announced their role in creating and supporting Common Tag, a new semantic tagging format. Yahoo! says that Common Tag makes “web content more discoverable” and enables the community to “create more useful applications for aggregating, searching, and browsing the web.” Their blog post mentions that they want to accelerate the structuring of the […]
Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called “rich snippets” that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites […]
Nielsen Research came out with interesting statistics on overall video consumption last week indicating that total TV consumption reached record levels when considering traditional broadcast video, time shifted video, web video and mobile video. This seems to fly in the face of the predictions that online video is cannibalizing the traditional business model. The web […]
Video search and SEO services provider EveryZing has introduced MediaCloud, an online service that automatically generates search-friendly metadata for video, audio and other rich media content. One of the big problems with rich media is that without accompanying metadata that describes the contents, video and audio files are essentially “invisible” to search engines. MediaCloud seeks […]
The best time to start working on SEO is before you start building your site. It goes back to that old saying: “If you don’t have time to do it right, will you have the time to do it over?” And, of course you don’t have time to do it over. One of the biggest […]
Google is testing a number of changes to its search results, including a way for select publishers to enhance their page descriptions, a way for searchers to jump to sub-sections of a web page and automatically correcting misspelled queries, to some degree.
In July Yahoo! launched their BOSS API, which enables you to “build your own search service”. Today, they’ve expanded the functionality of that API by adding a Key Terms feature. The technology used in Key Terms is the same used for Search Assist, which provides search suggestions and enables searchers to explore concepts related to […]
We are about to lose one of our most valuable national treasures: The news archive. Most experts recommend that tapes be converted to digital format within 5 to 10 years of being recorded and estimate the shelf life of magnetic tape at 15 years, perhaps longer if stored at a constant 21 degrees Celsius and 40% […]
Like many of you, I’ve attended lots of industry shows and events during the past several months related to search and directional marketing. What is especially amazing to me is how frequently I am asked about the ‘secret sauce’ behind optimizing online videos for search success, especially with regard to organic search. Truth is, we’ve […]
Like other search engines, Google already distinguishes between various types of content. You can search specifically for images, videos, books, blog posts, and so forth. Google has separate search engines for each. But two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that’s gathered from ordinary web pages.
Michael Gray noticed that Google News is continuously indexing old stories on some sites as new stories. Yes, this is the exact issue that influenced United Airlines stock price drop just a week ago. Google blamed the Tribune for the article not containing a date, which is a fair accusation. But As Michael shows, Google […]
I’m generally not given to hyperbole or breathless enthusiasm when writing about a new search service. Quite the opposite, in fact—over the decade I’ve covered search I’ve seen so many so-called “radically new” approaches that are simply updates or spins on existing technologies that I’ve grown a bit jaded. But not after seeing a demo […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
I know. I know. Seasoned search engine optimization (SEO) professionals might yawn and roll their eyes when the subject of meta-tag optimization comes up, as they might think, "Meta-tag optimization is SO 1990s." Personally, I think meta-tag content gets a bad rap because, in the past, many SEO professionals and website owners exploited meta-tags to […]
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 […]
The Library of Congress has teamed up with Flickr to create The Commons. The Library of Congress has added a sample of their over one million photos to Flickr, so that the Flickr community can help describe the photos through tagging. My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven from the Library of Congress […]
The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced Google has added a Sitemaps protocol for videos. If you have videos and want to give Google more metadata on those videos to make them more searchable via Google Video Search, you now can.
Today, Google’s Webmaster Tools have been updated with new diagnostic features that alert site owners to problems Google may have extracting content from pages. In addition, they’ve added Video Sitemaps. They’ve also added Hungarian and Czech to the 20 languages already supported. Below more about these features and how best to use them.
High-quality YouTube videos coming soon from News.com reports Steve Chen, YouTube’s co-founder, said YouTube will be offering high-quality streams of YouTube videos within three months. YouTube will detect the Internet connection of the user and offer the HD quality option if the speed is fast enough. In other YouTube news, YouTube announced they have added […]
If there’s anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it’s the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It’s practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I’ll explain more about why you shouldn’t worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search […]
Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them from the New York Times is a big giant love story to video search firm Blinkx, suggesting that the idea of finding video content will take a leap through new idea of speech recognition. In reality, it’s not a new idea. It’s been in […]
Jonathan Mendez’s 7 Ways to Optimize Your YouTube Tags has a more detailed look at optimizing your YouTube videos. Here are some of the tips in summary. Use relevant tags to describe the video Use as many relevant tags as possible Think long tail searches when it comes to tags also Use adjectives Add category […]
I’ve long held the view that while tagging can be useful for improving some types of searches, tagging also has problems that can inject noise or ambiguity and actually muddy search results. Nonetheless, tagging is clearly not a fad, and it may even eventually replace hierarchal indexing systems used by most libraries, according to new […]