Wednesday, August 31, 2005

SearchThis: Keys to the Search Kingdom

iMedia Connection: SearchThis: Keys to the Search Kingdom: "the universe of all things search still boils down to one key principle: he who owns the audience owns the search business.

Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN search own the market, at least according to Hitwise's August 2005 United States Online Search Report. Audience share, demographic analysis and search behavior combined provide us with key insights into the minds of searchers everywhere....

Hitwise reports the big three search sites (Yahoo!, MSN and Google) account for nearly 73 percent of all search activity. Google is the strongest and still owns almost 40 percent of online searches, while trailing Yahoo! and MSN own around 18 percent and 15 percent, respectively, for the week ending July 23.

Even better than audience market share by visitors is the telling average session time data that indicates Google audiences tend to spend nearly twice as much time on the site, with an average session of over 12 minutes compared to MSN's six and one half minutes.

Does that mean it takes a searcher twice as long to find what he's looking for on Google?

Possibly, but Hitwise attributes longer session times to the image search taxonomy -- because users can view results on the search site, they tend to stay on the page longer..

Yahoo! led the travel search category by a slight margin of two-tenths of one percent at 4.73 percent."

Google

Paying For Links -> High Rankings� Search Engine Optimization Forum

Paying For Links -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "Paying For Links, to gain reputation

J Whalen holds that " I have no idea of what Google or any of the engines are currently doing, but it makes sense to me that they would attempt to figure out which links might be purchased ones (and therefore not a vote) and simply not count them as a link."

Google

Traffic Power Gets Schooled

Traffic Power Gets Schooled: "professor Sullivan will walk you step by step through the allegations Traffic Power has made against Aaron Wall of SEO Book and he will provide links to sites you may not be familiar with. "

Google

Search engine insiders talk about links

Search engine insiders talk about links

At a recent search engine conference, Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google and Kaushal Kurapti from Ask Jeeves revealed information on how these three search engines analyze links to determine the ranking of web pages in a public discussion.

Basically, the old linking principle still applies: if page a links to page b then it is a recommendation from page a to page b. The more links point to your web site, the better your rankings.

Ask Jeeves - text links can be understood by search engines but not image links, avoid link farms, cloaked pages and invisible or hidden links - ethical search engine optimization is still important.

Yahoo - link popularity on Yahoo would be moving to the social community aspect, links to your web site should look natural.

Google - agreed with Ask Jeeves' statements, add new page of content everyday, links to your web site should not all have same text, Google only returns a few of the backlinks in their index.

How can you improve the link popularity of your web site without upsetting search engines? Focus on ethical search engine optimization. Don't try to cheat search engines and don't go for one shot quick fix solutions.

Google

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Defending the Art and Craft of SEO

iMedia Connection: Defending the Art and Craft of SEO: "trademarkSEO's Paul Bruemmer explains why getting into the top 10 organic listings may ultimately be worth more than perching at the top of the sponsored listings...

While it's wise to utilize both PPC and organic SEO techniques, the powerful benefits of SEO should not be minimized. The durability of your organic SEO investment goes a long way in elevating your brand to a premier position in the major search engines -- because organic links are valued by the majority of users and account for the majority of offline conversions.

Getting into the top 10 organic listings may be a slower process, but ultimately it can be worth more than perching at top of the sponsored listings."

Google

When Content Isn't King in SEO

ClickZ Experts on Search Engine Marketing Strategies By Shari Thurow: REVIEWS THE MARKET AND METHODS OF GENERATING CONTENT AND CONCLUDES "Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time-consuming. No matter how much SEOs try to be spin doctors, the process is neither easy nor fast. Don't be so desperate to hire an SEO firm that promises quick-and-easy, high-quality content. You may find your company at the receiving end of a lawsuit."

Google

Monday, August 29, 2005

MSN.com beta home page

MSN.com although search focused also seems to be a new approach to marketing MSN services like MyMSN, Hotmail & MSN messenger

Google

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Court Okays Use of Trademarks in Google Searches

E-Commerce News: Legal : Court Okays Use of Trademarks in Google Searches: "Court Okays Use of Trademarks in Google Searches

In a recent decision that might have long-term implications on how Internet search engines run their advertising programs, the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia released its written opinion on Government Insurance Company v. Google, Inc., et al., a case decided a while back.

The Court ruled that there was insufficient evidence to bar the defendant, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) , from displaying the banner ads of competitive insurers when Internet users conduct a search using the trademarked terms of the plaintiff, Government Employees Insurance Company ("GEICO"), such as the trademark "GEICO Direct."

Despite the many flaws noted by the Court of the expert survey, the Court did find GEICO's survey results to be sufficient to establish a likelihood of confusion regarding advertisements displayed in Google's ad program that included GEICO's trademarked terms in the actual advertisements next to the organic listings.

Because of this remaining potential liability of trademark infringement, the Court left several legal questions unanswered, including whether Google itself is liable for any Lanham Act violations (the question of whether the advertisers themselves were in violation was not before the Court since they were not a party in the case), the time frame during which the violations occurred and the measure of damages or other relief that GEICO may be entitled to if Google is found liable.

With regards to these last remaining issues, the Court decided to temporarily stay the proceedings to give GEICO and Google time to consider the Court's written opinion and to determine whether the parties themselves can resolve the remaining issues of liability and damages."

Google

The future of search is Vertical

The future of search is Vertical: Marketing Monitor - Aug. 18, 2005: "Some co-workers just came back from the SES in San Jose and one thing that they said that made me take notice was how much the search engines were pushing verticals...Search engines define verticals a little more loosely – calling anything that is related a vertical search. In other words searching for images on Google or Yahoo! is a vertical search, as is a video search, product search or local search...

I wouldn’t be surprised if, over time, you begin to see a meshing of results. So that when you do a search you may see the top organic results, but interspersed within them may be local results, Froogle results, and even image and media results. They don’t have to be as they are now where the non-organic results by default get the top positions on the screen; they could be mixed into the results based on their likelihood to match."

Google

Friday, August 26, 2005

Aviation search terms

Hitwise Competitive Intelligence - Hitwise: " top five unique search terms which resulted in visits to the Aviation category, for the week ending 07/05/2005."

Below are the top five unique search terms which resulted in visits to the Aviation category, for the week ending 07/05/2005.
Rank Search Term Market Share
1 easyjet 9.52%
2 ryanair 7.17%
3 british airways 3.10%
4 flybe 2.56%
5 easy jet 2.39%
Based on UK data.

Google

Is It Appropriate for a Site to Monetize its Page Rank as Well as its Page Impressions?

Is It Appropriate for a Site to Monetize its Page Rank as Well as its Page Impressions?: "Matt Cutts, a leading software engineer at Google who often represents them on issues of spam, chimes in on this debate with the following comment:

As others have noted, if you're going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links...

Google's view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda's. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page.

Wow! It will be very interesting to see where this all goes. In my opinion, Google created this beast and now they are trying to tame it. Internet marketers who either buy or sell links will definitely want to keep their eye on this issue and what policies end up being formed as a result of it."

Google

Yahoo Ad System Crashes, Angering Advertisers in the Process

Yahoo Ad System Crashes, Angering Advertisers in the Process

Google

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Avoiding Search Engine Penalties or Getting Out From Under Them

Avoiding Search Engine Penalties or Getting Out From Under Them: "How To Get Our From Under a Search Engine Penalty

What do you do if you have been penalized or even banned? There are two things you can do. One is to get a new domain and start all over but without employing the same tactics that got you penalized in the first place. That is one way but certainly not the best in my opinion because often times people have built a brand name or put extensive time into developing and marketing their sites.

Once you discover the tactic or tactics that were used, you need to remove them. If it is tons of useless doorway pages then you must delete them. If you are hiding text then it must be removed. Linking to bad sites? Get rid of the links. Whatever the violation, it has to be remedied. It is only then that you will have the opportunity the come out from under the penalty. Sometimes this can happen automatically because the penalty was simply a spam filter the engine had built into in their algorithm. Other times you have to contact the engine, admit what you did, detail the steps you have taken to reverse the violation and ask for forgiveness. After all that is done, you wait patiently. It could take as little as a month or as in my own personal experience, a full year.

Who do you contact? Contact Google help@google.com, Yahoo at reportsearchspam@yahoo-inc.com and MSN at msnbot@microsoft.com."

Google

Pay Per Call � A Report Card

Pay Per Call A Report Card: "PPCall programs allow SEM firms and agencies to diversify their existing offerings, capturing revenue from new audiences. Roughly 14 million small businesses do not currently transact business online, and this product is uniquely designed to serve this untapped market. Larger firms selling products that require high-touch sales technique can also use PPCall.

Ingenio sees Pay Per Call as a great fit for advertisers whose products and services require a back and forth exchange prior to purchase. High-end travel, financial services, real estate and mortgage companies are a few examples. These advertisers are proficient at telephone sales, and Pay Per Call plays well to their skills.

Advertiser Case Study From Ingenio...AIL currently has about 5 different Pay Per Call ads running, and Dave finds the Pay Per Call ads cost less and convert better than his click ads -- at roughly 7-10% as compared to 1-2% with clicks. He is currently bidding $2 a call for most of his ads, $10 a call for one ad. With an average sale of up to $400, he is very pleased with the ROI thus far."

Google

Froogle Mobile Might Shake Up Your Business

Froogle Mobile Might Shake Up Your Business: "Those innovative engineers over at Google are at it again. This time they are bringing the power of Froogle to the palm of your hand. Froogle Mobile launched yesterday and is now available on phones that support WML (WAP 1.2). How does this launch impact you? "

Google

Search Engine Q&A On Links - Matt Cutts - on Google URLS & session ids

Deciphering Matt Cutts -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum : "article on SES link Q&A session."

Coverage of SES San Jose: Search Engine Q&A On Links @ Stephan Spencers Scatterings: "Matt Cutts from Google:

Good links are earned links, links that are based on editorial discretion.

Create services that really useful. e.g newsletters, an article a day, syndicate through RSS (attribute my article and give me a link).

Start a blog.

Matt launched his blog today: mattcutts.com

Think outside the box.

Only SEOs and librarians do backlink searches. Historically we decided to dedicate a subset of our servers to backlinks. Only a sampling of backlinks would be displayed but only for a threshold of PageRank 4 or higher pages. A suggestion was made to show backlinks for lower PageRank pages too. We liked that idea so we now show a random sampling of backlinks, including low PageRank scoring pages too. We show twice as many backlinks as shown before, but still it’s only a sampling of the backlinks.

In graph theory, a clique in every node in the graph is very unnatural. So don’t link to every single node in your network of sites; it’ll get flagged.

For dynamic sites, you’re very safe if you have fewer than 2 parameters; keep the values of those parameters to fewer than 5 digits, and don’t name a parameter “id”. Googlebot sometimes tries variations of URLs by dropping parameters, but we only do that deep level analysis on big, quality sites.

Another good approach that alltheweb came up with: spider would always go 1 dynamic page deep from a static page.

Search engines only grab 100k or 200k or 500k so be careful loading up a huge page with a lot of links.

PageRank isn’t as important as SOME people make it out to be. BUT it’s NOT like “PageRank? Oh yeah let’s shuffle that one under the rug! That was sooo 4 years ago!”

“BO” = backlink obsession

We export PageRank only once every 3 months or so."

Google

Terrence Gordon, Search Engine Optimizer

Terrence Gordon, Search Engine Optimizer Jennifer writes "I don't often post links to interviews, but this one has some good insight into the industry for people new to the idea of search engine marketing. Find out how an experienced search engine marketer thinks the industry has changed over the years, what he thinks of the ongoing white hat/black hat debate and which engines he thinks search marketers should be focused on."

Google

Yahoo Draws Up Free Sitemaps

Yahoo Draws Up Free Sitemaps: "When Google debuted its Sitemaps to allow for faster spidering, many wondered when Yahoo would do the same.

Yahoo! Site Explorer: "Site Explorer BETA"

This will be a way to get lots of URLs indexed in one go:

"You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz."

SEO Scoop flagged up another Yahoo treat - a request form to get sites crawled and indexed quicker, for free.

Yahoo! Submit Your Site: "Submit Your Site

Enter the full URL, including the http:// prefix (for example, http://www.yahoo.com) of the site you would like to submit.
Enter only the top-level page in your site, our crawler will explore the rest of your site from there. We will automatically detect and remove dead links on an ongoing basis.

You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz."

Yahoo provides a way to get a whole bunch of URLs indexed in one shot:

You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz"

Google

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Local Search - Searching For Main Street -

Forbes.com: "The next fierce battlefield for Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft is local search. About $100 billion is spent per year on local advertising, with about $15 billion spent on yellow pages advertising. Of the 4 billion monthly online searches, roughly 1.1 billion involve local search...

The key finding was that customers tend to rely on word of mouth when choosing a local merchant.

The result was Judy's Book, which is a site that includes local business listings for all 50 states. Users can write reviews and share them with friends--as well as even create private Web pages. Other cool features include newsletter and e-mail forwarding.

"The problem with search is that it is too mathematical," said Sack. "Basically, marketers find ways to game the system. As with us, we make search based on those who you trust, your friends. We call this 'social search.'"

The ethos of the firm is collaboration. And this even extends to its technology; that is, the company wants to provide best-of-breed solutions for its community. For example, it recently agreed to license Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) mapping technology. "Our programmers couldn't wait to get their hands on the API," said Sack.

Apparently, things are working very well. When I talked to them, they said the surge in traffic was putting a strain on their servers.

It is still the early innings for local search. There are sure to be many more surprises in this race. And, that's already been the case for both Insider Pages and Judy's Notebook. For example, on Insider Pages, the most popular category is hairstylists. "It should be no surprise, I guess. In LA, your hair is a very important asset.""

Google

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

� July 2005 search engine market shares

July 2005 search engine market shares: Google - 36.5%, Yahoo! - 30.5%, MSN - 15.5% | IT Facts Your Daily Research Synopsis | ZDNet.com: "You've seen the HitWise data on search engine market shares in July 2005, now ComScore Networks presented its findings. For July 2005 searches Google led with 36.5% share, Yahoo! was second with 30.5%. MSN was third with 15.5%, AOL had 9.9%, Ask had 6.1%, InfoSpace accounted for 0.9%. Among those users who preferred searching from their browser toolbars, 51% of search queries went to Yahoo! Search. 11% of Web searches were originated from toolbars. "

Google

The Power of Search at Work

Murthy vs the Goliaths: The Power of Search at Work: "In the good old days, online was the place where David could beat Goliath. It was the forum where success was decided not just by market cap or the size of your advertising budget, but by nimble strategies and just plain chutzpah. It was the place where the little guy could triumph and slam one in the face of the corporate behemoths. But those days are over, right?
Not quite, at least not in the legal field...

Murthy.com is the official online home for a small immigration law firm based in Owings Mill, Maryland. Just 9 attorneys, in an office that’s probably smaller than the executive washroom at Baker and McKenzie. Yet, Ms. Murthy is kicking the big guys butts around the online block. And we’re not talking a slight edge in traffic. According to Hitwise’s market share report, Murthy.com captures 10 times the market share of these 4 huge firms combined.

I must admit, I was a little skeptical at first. So I tried some quick checks on Alexa. Sure enough, the small firm from Owings Mill was decimating the big guys when it came to generating internet traffic...

As search marketers, we often assume that the whole world knows about the power of search. Sometimes, it takes a blatant example like this to make us realize that a large part of the world is still waking up to the new reality of online marketing. And as long as the giants are sleeping, there’s still the opportunity for the Sheela Murthy’s of the world to eat their lunch.

Come on, admit it. Aren’t you going to be just a little bit sorry when those days are gone?"

Google

Too much news?

ClickZ Launches Blog:

"Looks like Robert and I aren't the only ones having a tough time making editorial decisions on what news to cover. The folks over at ClickZ have launched their own blog, and they've done it for pretty much the exact same reasons that we have.
Rebecca Lieb explains the reasoning of the ClickZ team in deciding to add a blog to the mix. Basically, it boils down to these key points:
Search Marketing (and for ClickZ, online marketing) has expanded to the point that it's almost impossible to do a comprehensive job covering it with articles.
Blogs allow for coverage and commentary without actually having to write stories, thus allowing for broader coverage."

Google

Slashdot | Google Releases GDS 2.0

Slashdot | Google Releases GDS 2.0: "'Google (now $4bn richer) has released v2.0 of Google Desktop. Many new features are introduced including improved Outlook filtering, Gmail indexing, and the feature which is most likely to cause the largest stir...a new Sidebar which displays RSS feeds, a Gmail inbox, news, scratch pad and more. Plug-ins for the new Sidebar are also available including a to-do list, clock, and more. As one blogger pointed out this morning...the release of Google Desktop 2.0 is beginning to take shape as a browser in itself as the need for a Firefox or IE is almost eliminated.' "

Google

Monday, August 22, 2005

robotstxt.org

robotstxt.org: "source for information on the robots.txt Robots Exclusion Standard and other articles about writing well-behaved Web robots. "

Covers:
The Web Robots FAQ
Robots Exclusion
List of Robots
The Robots Mailing List
Articles and Papers
Related Sites

Google

Monday, August 15, 2005

Yahoo! UK to launchpay-per-call search advertising service

eyefortravel.com - Travel Distribution News, Events and Analysis: "Offering its consumers more choice and providing e-commerce advertisers more options in how they communicate with customers, Yahoo! UK and Ireland is to launch a pay-per-call search advertising service across its retail channels. "

Google

Academia's quest for the ultimate search tool

Academia's quest for the ultimate search tool | CNET News.com: "The University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies and is in talks with search giants including Google to join the project, CNET News.com has learned...

The search problems of today are different from those of five years ago. With books, scholarly papers and television programs being digitized and put online, the technology necessary to search through the material needs to be that much better. People need a way to trust the information they find and to ask more-complex questions with search tools so they can extract knowledge or ideas.

He said it will likely take another four of five years to build such functionality that can scale computationally for wide consumer usage and deliver the kind of efficiencies the government and Internet users expect. The universities of Texas and Pennsylvania are also exploring different approaches to the same problem.

Stanford continues in its role as a breeding ground for search projects. Since 2003, Google has purchased at least two projects hatched at Stanford--personalization search tool Kaltix and a project from Anna Patterson, a Stanford computer science research associate. Stanford associate professor Andrew Ng, among others, is working on artificial-intelligence techniques for extracting knowledge from text in a search index."

Google

GuruNet and Norwegian Opera Software join to incorporate Answers.com

pandia.com Search Engine News, on Web searching and search engine optimization: "GuruNet and Norwegian Opera Software are cooperating to incorporate Answers.com content directly into Opera's browser and Web portal.

GuruNet's Answers.com content and services will be available to Opera users via a co-branded version of Answers.com. It will be accessible via Opera's drop down search toolbar"

Google

Free SEO Tools

SiteProNews is a free newsletter and webmaster resource site: "Monitor Your Visibility in Google, MSN, and Yahoo with these DIY SEO Tools "

Google

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Lycos The Underdog of Search

Business 2.0 :: Online Article :: Future Boy With a new CEO and a fresh approach to search, Lycos plans to rise again by focusing on user-generated content. By Erick Schonfeld

"Tolle, thankfully, does not want to compete with the leading search companies. Instead, he wants Lycos to organize the culture of participation that's bubbling up all over the Web with blogs, podcasts, photo-sharing sites, and other forms of consumer-created content.

'Nobody is concentrating on this,' he insists on a recent visit to my office. 'We want to help people mix their own music, cut their own videos, and write their own editorials. We want Lycos to be the place where people create content, store it, and market it.' In other words, he wants Lycos to become the ultimate user-centric search tool, with a blog search engine, a photo search engine, a music search engine, and a video search engine all rolled into one. And he'll leave the rest of the Web to Google, Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo (YHOO).

Tolle plans to begin unveiling the new Lycos by November. It will be interesting to see if he can make Lycos into a marketing platform for content creators on the Web. Tolle hints at a combination of search advertising and revenue sharing, along with cross-marketing opportunities and even exposure to talent agencies."

Google

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Murdoch concedes News Corp. seeks search engine

Net Stocks: "What's in a search engine? Apparently, a powerful adhesive to glue together all the assets of the newly formed Fox Interactive Media. For that reason it's a technology that Rupert Murdoch knows he needs.

Search is also a 'catalyst' for the mix of Alibaba's commerce assets that might help the Chinese auction company embark on accelerated growth.

Earlier this week, News Corp. (NWS: news, chart, profile) CEO Murdoch told analysts that the media conglomerate was in talks to take a majority stake in a search engine. "

Google

Friday, August 12, 2005

Link Buying � The Search Engines Respond

Link Buying The Search Engines Respond: "Google, Yahoo, and Ask have a much different take on link buying than do the SEMs. Chris Richardson of WebProNews sat in on this Q&A at SES 2005."

"Another interesting segment from the Q and A concerned the admonishment of excessive inter-linking of sites (linking to sites you own). The search engine reps all advised against doing this, to which an audience member asked Tim Mayer of Yahoo why his company had a link to almost every property they owned on their index page.

"The response didn't really clarify the situation in my mind... Tim mainly indicated it was because these properties were part of the same network, although I'm not sure how this is any different than a site owner linking to his stable of Internet properties..."

Getting The Kinks Out of Links: "This session had a lot of good information and allowed people to pick the brains of these experts in the field. Eric Ward had some of the best comments and he would know as he helped promote Amazon when they first launched. Danny Sullivan calls him the definitive link building guru.

He discussed the importance of 301 redirects when changing a site domain name or a directory structure. Make sure you reclaim links by using server logs (when sites change domains, you can reclaim the links pointing to the old site). Use refer data and site logs to determine which old link was clicked and implement a 301 redirect.

Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link had a lot of great information too. Just like she stressed in yesterday's 'Link Building Basics' session, today she stressed anchor text as extremely important. She suggested using it in any link you have, both onpage and outbound.

Make sure you optimize the site keyword-wise before you go on a link building campaign. Links embedded in content with the proper anchor text get more weight than navigation links.

Optimize links on pages with keywords, emulate natural linking patterns and stagger the link text throughout the copy. A wide variety (pagerank-wise) of inbound link are good but stay within your niche.

Linking out is a great way to build trust among sites and it can help you get links pointing to you. Cross-linking, if you own lots of sites, can be great but don't over do it. Make sure you have some other links besides ones to your sites. "

Google

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Different engine different SEO needed

“OverlapAnalysis :: Different Engines, Different Results”, meta-search engine Dogpile and researchers from Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh, examined search results from over 12,500 random, user-entered search queries on Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves. Of the 12,500 inquiries, which produced a total of 485,460 results, only 5,301 or 1.1% produced the same first page results across all engines. The significance of this change over the past year and a half magnified when compared with a similar study released by Dogpile in May, which showed a 3% overlap in total search results."

Executive Summary 1 page PDF


Chris Sherman comments: Search Engine Results Continuing to Diverge

"84.9% of total results are unique to one engine
11.4% of total results were shared by any two engines
2.6% of total results were shared by any three engines
1.1% of total results were shared by any four engines

The implications of these findings are significant for both searchers and marketers. Searchers relying on a single search engine are missing a vast swath of web content that they could easily find simply by trying their queries on other engines. And marketers targeting a single search engine in their optimization efforts are effectively abandoning a potentially huge amount of traffic from other sources.

Just how unique are the results on each engine? On average:

73.9% of Ask Jeeves first page results were unique to Ask Jeeves
71.2% of Yahoo first page results were unique to Yahoo
70.8% of MSN search first page results were unique to MSN search
66.4% of Google first page results were unique to Google

This suggests that opportunities continue to abound for search marketers to gain exposure despite increasing competition among advertisers, particularly for less commonly used "search tail" terms."

Google

Yahoo! updating index

Yahoo! Search blog: "a significant milestone at Yahoo! Search – our index now provides access to over 20 billion items. While we typically don't disclose size (since we've always said that size is only one dimension of the quality of a search engine), for those who are curious this update includes just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files. Note that as with all index updates we are still tuning things so you’ll continue to see some fluctuation in ranking over the next few weeks.

Ensuring you find what you're looking for is the true measure of search engine quality and something we strive for every day. We measure quality in terms of RCFP – Relevance, Comprehensiveness, Freshness, and Presentation and continue to work on improving those metrics"

Google: "Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages" but estimated that Google indexes around 11 billion items...so a web item shoulld have double the chance of being in Yahoo's index...

Google

Monday, August 08, 2005

What the Search Engines Are Searching For

What the Search Engines Are Searching For: "Search engines are hiring recruiters to use search engines to find search engine marketers to work at... search engines...How convoluted is that?"

Google

Sunday, August 07, 2005

Customer inquiries increase by 5,000% after improving position on search engine listings.

: "Net upgrade is a smart move

AN online mortgage provider has seen customer inquiries increase by 5,000 per cent after improving its position on Internet search engine listings.

The success could see The Mortgage Advisory Service, based in Newcastle, expand and open more offices in the North-East.
The company, which also has offices in Middlesbrough and Sunderland, enlisted the help of digital marketing company Green Media to transform its website and increase its presence on the world wide web.

The firm is now growing fast with a client database of more than 40,000 from across the UK and overseas."

Google

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Is Seo Worth It ?

Is Seo Worth It ? -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "Is Seo Worth It ?, SEO is a lot of work, is it worth it"

Google

I'm Stuck With A Bad Seo Company

High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "I'm Stuck With A Bad Seo Company, what to do now?" WORTH A READ...

Google

Coping with Search Engine Penalties

Coping with Search Engine Penalties: "Search engine penalties are present and pervasive, and are a primary method used by search engines to control webmasters. Unless webmasters understand what they are and what to do about them, their websites could easily trigger a penalty, losing traffic and revenue.

The difficulty with search engine penalties is that it's impossible to determine with certainty whether or not your site does have a penalty, and what the penalty is. Why? The search engines don't publicly acknowledge the existence of penalties, and won't generally respond directly if asked whether a site has been penalized. Therefore it's impossible to offer a hard-and-fast rule that can help you look for penalties. Likewise, there are no all-encompassing methods to remove the penalties from your site...."

Google

How SEMs Can Help Protect Brands Online

ClickZ Experts on Search Engine Optimization: "How SEMs Can Help Protect Brands Online
By P.J. Fusco"

Google

Google to increase ad copy limitt

Search Engine War: "Gooooooogle to increase ad copy

Google are planning to increase their ad copy length up to 200 characters. Basically, titles and display urls will remain the same, but advertisers will now have the capacity to write a description which is 200 characters long."

Google

Microsoft test MSN Keywords

Search Engine Journal � Microsoft Enters Search Advertising Mix With MSN Keywords: "Microsoft Enters Search Advertising Mix With MSN Keywords

MSN announcing that MSN Keywords (part of MSN adCenter) will be launching via invitation only next week to 500 MSN advertisers. The Wall Street Journal reports that next week Microsoft is announcing “plans to begin U.S. testing of MSN Keywords, its own system for placing ads on its MSN Internet search site. The system will debut in the U.S. in test form in October, according to Joe Doran, senior director, MSN.”"

Google

Yahoo Tests New Audio Search Feature

Yahoo Tests New Audio Search Feature - Forbes.com: "Yahoo Tests New Audio Search Feature

Yahoo Inc. on Thursday will begin testing a new search engine feature that will pore through millions of songs offered by popular Internet music services like iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster."

Google

Slashdot | Microsoft Testing Rival to Google's Start Page

Slashdot | Microsoft Testing Rival to Google's Start Page: "aer0 writes 'It looks like start.com">Microsoft has quietly put up their version of Google's start page. It's interesting in several ways. First, the layout and use of javascript is strikingly similar to Google's. Second, one of the few major differences is that there is no MS equivalent banner or other flashing indication that it is an MS site.'"

Google
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