The Web 2.0 SEO MindMap is now only available for Firefox Browsers. From the Home page of our website (or most pages), it is located on the sidebar navigation menu, flash must be installed.
You can search the map using the search box (upper left hand tools), you can drag the map with left-mouse-button-down, drag. Red arrows follow hyperlinks.
We hope you find the information contained in the MindMap useful, we continue to update as we research SEO in the new age.
We have (as usual) been really busy around here, what with new releases and new tools, nobody is getting much sleep. First, I wanted to announce the new version of the xFolk Cloud Generator v0.5 (I think you’re gonna like it) … but we’ve also added some new tools. We also have some new alliances that continue to make us stronger.
I wasn’t going to do this but … here is a bit of a brain dump from the think factory here. We think that ‘Tagging’ is like ‘Candy Cigarettes’, A way to get people smoking/thinking ‘Classification Theory’, we know that the only real way to SEO nowadays is RELEVANCE RELEVANCE RELEVANCE, and there are just too many flaws in Tagging to ensure a lasting value. Semantic Inter-linking will most likely rule the day … like a localized phone book … you subscribe to the cloud and have your info on tap. If you don’t know about SIOC (semantic web) well, your reading the wrong Blog, best you find some SEO guru who will tell you that ‘on the page SEO’ is out and begging for links is ‘in’.
‘On the page’ is back stronger than ever - but perhaps not the way most SEO’s think - I won’t ‘give away the store’ here but it simply depends on what you are doing with your ‘on the page’ optimization, yes, Meta’s won’t get you very far anymore but if you are a client of ours - then you know how to optimize your ‘on the page’ so you are guaranteed participation in the ‘new web’.
Yes, it is a new web, the fixes are in to correct the failures of the past. I would be so bold as to say that search as we know it is a joke (and just getting funnier everyday). We do care about Organic Search for all the obvious reasons but we have always cared more about conversion and you just ain’t gonna convert someone who arrived by mistake.
I guess if you stay tuned to this channel I will continue to accidentally slip a bit of cutting edge Strategy … it seems none of the other SEO’s are talking about it … but things have changed so dramatically in this field, that you can just throw your old SEO howto books away.
Survival Techniques for Yahoo Jawad Shuaib wrote a guest post for ReadWriteWeb today called What Yahoo Must Do to Survive, and I thought it was worth some comments as I have some disagreements with it. First, for disclosure purposes, I work for Yahoo! running the product marketing for our display ad platforms. This gives me some internal perspective, but also may leave me somewhat biased for many reasons.
Survival Techniques for Yahoo
Additionally, I have no special insight into what the search business at Yahoo is doing, nor do I control overall company strategy. Display ad platform strategy is a different story.
That being said, the summary of Jawads article is that Yahoo! should abandon many of its efforts in multiple areas in order to refocus on search (and I assume search monetization).
Ive heard this strategy a few times. My main thoughts accompanied with some questions are:
1. Is search a battle Yahoo! can win and gain back significant market share? I think Yahoo! has done some great things recently like opening up search with BOSS, but Google has effectively become the consumer brand of choice. It will take something major to change that. It can happen, and perhaps Yahoo! can do it, but is it the most likely bet for the company to succeed?
Im not sure succeeding in search is a matter of Yahoo! not putting enough resources against it or a lack of focus. Perhaps it was a lack of resources and focus three years ago when the market share gap was closer, but I think now it will take a radical innovation that changes the way people search to unseat Google. Yahoo! could do it, but I dont think it needs the entire companys focus to make that happen.
2. Yahoos strength and success over the past couple of years has been in building amazing web properties that lead their vertical and then monetizing those properties through display ads. These properties also help drive/maintain search market share from users visiting the properties using Yahoos search which is integrated into them. One common business theme is that a company should focus on its strengths. Would abandoning those things to focus on search satisfy that?
Now to address some of Jawads specific points:
To remain a profitable business, Yahoo! needs to refocus on the search market. The primary revenue generator for both Yahoo! and Google is search and its highly coveted advertising space. The search market, in other words, is the lifeblood of the companys business model.
Lifeblood is too strong a word. The display and services businesses at Yahoo! are not small potatoes. Of course Yahoo! should be concerned about search market share dropping, but its not the only thing going.
Worse yet, the company seems to be everywhere at once, investing in a dizzying array of services that do little to enhance its search standing. What does a search and advertising company need with Flickr, Yahoo! Greetings, Yahoo! Personals, Del.icio.us, Yahoo! Pets, Blo.gs, Upcoming.org, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! 360, or Webjay?
Id agree that the company has invested in too many areas. A couple of the aforementioned properties have already been shuttered, others got hit hard in recent layoffs, and I expect 2009 will trim it up even more. One thing to remember though, is that many of the properties and services dont require massive investments to keep them operating and profitable.
These services have, thus far, offered little value to Yahoo!. The company has spent its time and resources maintaining services with a huge, financially unjustified overhead; all the while, its search market share continues to dwindle. In contrast, Google, realizing its product line was stretched too thin, has spent the past 2 years aggressively vertically integrating its various product offerings as features ported across its services. While Google has certainly expanded its horizon, advertising and search technology remain its unwavering focus.
Some of the services may have not offered a ton of value, but others have added tremendous value. Id argue Google has also expanded beyond their core focus. Google Docs isnt really search or advertising related, etc. Yahoo! has also always been more of a consumer portal from the start. It didnt start as a core search business like Google.
Yahoo! needs to refocus on the search market. The digital dinosaur is simply not in the position to continue experimenting or investing in markets that it doesnt already have a significant command of. By spending time and money building a gamut of Web 2.0 services, Yahoo! is unnecessarily competing with hundreds of companies, when it should be competing with just two: Google and Microsoft. The company should let users build the content and focus instead on helping others effectively find it.
I dont think Yahoo! is really heavily investing in Web 2.0 technologies at this point, and didnt really in 2008 either. The companies it did buy before that like Flickr and Delicious have continued to be successful assets that were bought very cheaply. Letting the users build the content is also very much a Web 2.0 idea that Jawab is arguing they should move away from. I think the right path there is to focus on high value audiences and combine the creation of good unique content with also empowering users to contribute content. Im not in the audience business either though
Should Yahoo! continue to lose market share in search, the company will be unable to continue its operations elsewhere. Shutting down or selling off ineffective segments of its operation, such as Yahoo! Music, would go a long way towards retaining profitability and reigniting the search effort. Such cuts would undoubtedly require significant staff reductions; unfortunately, though, with dwindling profits and a bad economy, Yahoo! simply cannot afford to continue operating like the bloated behemoth it is today.
Again, many of these properties dont require much investment, but I agree with the general statement here that Yahoo! should cut properties that arent profitable and focus on a smaller number of areas. The company has already been making this move throughout 2008 and I suspect it will continue through 2009. Probably every technology company should listen to that advice in 2009.
This is not to say that Yahoo! is doomed. Apple found itself in much the same situation around 1997, only to see a resurgence under the leadership of the resurrected Steve Jobs. Yahoo! is in desperate need of fresh direction under a leader like Jobs if it is to win the battle against other giants. Yahoo! does not need a new religion. In fact, it needs to rediscover what it lost to ambition. It isnt too late yet, but Yahoo! needs to get off its butt and start fighting for its life.
I imagine a new CEO will provide some of this leadership, but Im also not sure Apple is a great comparison. I think Jobs actually helped provide new innovation at Apple, but Im not an expert on their story.
Jawabs theme is correct that Yahoo! does need to think hard about what it wants to do and streamline and focus on that. I just disagree with the conclusion that focusing only on search is the answer.
Updated Google Toolbar PageRank Google has updated its Toolbar Pagerank. A lot of people are talking about their PageRanks being changed. Sometimes the PageRank drops...
...by a huge margin and at times there have been increase also.
The change, anyways, has left a lot of web publishers and bloggers discussing their changes in PageRank on this New Year's Eve! We have also observed PageRank change for a number of our clients.
But at the same, it is the fact that the PageRank which is shown on the Google Toolbar is not enough to judge as to how Google ranks your site. A lot of other factors are involved.
Matt Cutts confirmed it on Twitter that it was indeed a Google update. He also followed it up on his blog, "In case you didnt see where I confirmed it on Twitter, Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update. Its pretty much done now. If you want more info, Ive answered questions about PageRank and the Google Toolbar in the past."
Who is leaving Google? Marissa Mayer? There are reports that Marissa Mayer is leaving Google. Barry Schwartz commented briefly about it today on SearchEngineLand and he points to...
...a report coming from Valleywag yesterday. I've heard Mayer speak at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose in August of 2007 where I took a few photographs of her conversation with Danny Sullivan, below. (Click the image for more photos)
She seemed personable and intelligent there as she discussed Google search and displayed the iPhone interface on her phone. I've briefly mentioned her comments in a post on "previous Query Refinement" but don't recall hearing much from her elsewhere.
To get a better idea of what google is losing if she does indeed depart, I took a look at a video of her presentations at Google I/O Developer conference 2008. Here's that hour long presentation if you have time for it:
It's often odd to see executives leave successful companies, knowing that they have made major, substantial contributions to the shape of that success. The video above is a great way to become familiar with what Google is losing.
Gawker apparently wants to poke with the sharpest stick and they focus on her personal fortune as the 19th employee of the startup, fresh out of Stanford and her laugh! The laugh does surface a time or two in her I/O conference presentation above, but seems endearing and humanizing there.
Google is apparently about to lose a big talent. I've often wondered why people leave startups after they go public - those who help to build the vision over time. Sergei and Larry are clearly not serial entrepreneurs. They are staying. Is Mayer on the way out?
Some New Years Predictions There are quite a few others are making 2009 predictions. Ive never been big on that, but I have a few thoughts on what might happen to SEO/SEM in 2009:
Google ignores all the low-hanging fruit, and easy-to-get links are rendered useless
Directories et. al. (low-hanging-fruit) hear final death knell
Content REALLY becomes King, as valuable links will only point at valuable content
Google goes on to dominate even more of the search space
Personalised search still doesnt gain traction
SERP ranking shuffles dynaically between searches - chasing ranking becomes even more futile
Social Media - links gained from social media users become more powerful as the low-hanging-fruit crap gets filtered out
The people who really get this social stuff \glances here\ will be in even more demand
Good creative folk - copy writers etc. - will see an increase in demand when the penny drops
More small businesses turn to SEO as chronic costs of PPC sets in
More businesses of all sizes get burnt by SEOs, you know the ones who havent got a clue, but promise you the Earth for a few hundred
SEO goes into mortal decline as search engines (all called Google) make it more and more difficult to game the results
The survivors online will have a deep understanding of multi-channel marketing, and beating customer expectations at every turn - its all about the marketing mix
Irish businesses, especially in lead-gen, turn more and more to conversion optimisation and testing
An Irish web agency starts offering testing as a core product/service (and not like every web designer now offers SEO)
One or more Irish web startups will come up with something that gains serious traction in 09
RedCardinal.ie releases some interesting tools -unfair insider knowledge ;)-
RedCardinal.ie turns off the server for good -more unfair insider knowledge...-
2008 Was a Weird Year
2008 was a weird year - Ive seen/learnt more than in any previous year, yet Ive not been blogging much about it. I could probably write as book about what Ive observed/done in 2008 - some really fantastic things.
And Ive been speaking to a few people about that point recently. So my New Years resolution is to try blogging a lot more in 2009.
Heres a Google logo doodle for 2009: Googl! This was showing on the Google homepage in Slovakia as the country shifted from Slovak Koruna to Euro currency.
The idea behind this doodle is plain enough to have been around before, and indeed it was. Not only do we have the spelling Micro$oft (with the connotation of evil money-hungry empire), but the following unofficial Euro doodle by Berlins Johannes Schubert was the winner of Logoogle.coms logo award in February 2005:
Google Guide to SEO and Social Media I was reading Googles guide to SEO (pdf) , and its actually pretty good from a website or business owner perspective. However heres a quote I found...
...interesting, this is something they recommend NOT to do on social media websites:
involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services.
For a long time Google endorsed viral link building on sites like Digg with no reservations. They figured the wisdom of crowds would naturally prevent undesirable content from becoming popular and getting links. Of course this is because the folks at Google tend to lead sheltered lives, and dont believe people would ever sell votes, links or social media influence for cold hard cash those of us living in the real world know otherwise. After living in denial though they eventually come around, and then start asking everyone to narc on other people, despite it being a really bad karma move.
How long before we see a How to report social media spam section of the google guidelines, and link to a form in webmaster central?
Ill-Advised Ads For Google Some critics maintain that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) can give away Gmail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, and all sorts of fabulous free tools, but the company's only really successful business is paid search ads. Those critics would not be surprised by Googles latest attempt to make some money from their massive investment in YouTube Inc.: paid search ads.
Ill-Advised Ads For Google
OK, even if youre not surprised by that move, you may be surprised by Googles decision to make the new paid search ads video ads. Some early customers claim to be satisfied.
But Im not sure YouTube video advertising is such a great idea.
Advertisers accustomed to the effectiveness of paid search in driving sales are unlikely to be happy with YouTube video ads for several reasons:
Video ads are harder to make. Paid search ads are plain text -- just a title and a description. While it takes skill and effort to craft a good search ad, I think it takes more to create a decent video. When its more difficult to make the ads, fewer advertisers will be successful.
Fewer people will click video ads. Even if you create a good video ad, its worthless unless you get folks to click on it. Because watching a video requires more of a time commitment than looking at a Web page, not as many people will look at a video ad.
Fewer people will buy from video ads. Its not that the video ads will be less persuasive -- perhaps theyll be more emotionally riveting and be even more effective than their plain text counterparts. No, the real reason that video ads will drive fewer sales is that they are being shown to the wrong people.
Why do I claim that video ad watchers are the wrong people? It all has to do with qualification. Think for a moment about the folks looking at paid search ads. Why are they searching in the first place? They are often trying to buy something. Not always, for sure, but often enough to make a paid search ad extremely timely. Youre reaching a potential customer at exactly the right moment with your message.
On the other hand, what are people doing when they watch YouTube? A cynic would claim they are wasting their time, but even a proponent of Web video like me would admit that they are looking for entertainment, not for products and services. In short, they arent qualified prospects. If youre showing your ads to the wrong people, it doesnt matter how interesting or inexpensive the ads are. What do those qualities matter if your ads are driving few sales?
Now, understand, video ads make sense for some businesses. I mean, if you are marketing a new movie, then it makes sense that youd be trying to get people to view your trailer. Thats how you get people to decide to go to the theater.
But most of us arent marketing movies. So, sure, go ahead and try video ads. Run an experiment to see if you increase sales based on video. But dont get carried away. If video ads dont carry their weight because other marketing tactics are more effective, shift your spending to tactics that work.
After all, youre better off driving sales than being innovative.
Bounce Rate Questions Regular readers will know that I have been in a somewhat involved debate on this blog and over at Sphinn on the issue of bounce rates as they might...
...now or later on apply to SEO. I maintain that is a matter of business necessity that search engines would try to more precisely measure user satisfaction with each result of each search phrase, and that bounce rates would be one metric they could use. Frequent readers will also know that I do not view bounce rates as a simple number or as a static pass-fail type of calculation. It would be a ridiculously simplistic algorithm that calculates bounces using such simple calculations, in my humble opinion.
Recently, Web Pro News reported that Google answers bounce rates questions. In fact, two separate answers were provided, one that relates to SEO and the other that relates to Google Analytics. Many webmasters will confuse the two and we all know thats how false rumors get started " the kind of false rumors that years from now will be reported as fact by many people calling themselves SEO expert.
It is possible that Google Analytics and SEO are related or will be related, but dont bank on it. Here is what Adam Lasnik of Google has to say specifically about bounce rates and SEO.
If youre talking about bounce rates in the context of Google Analytics, Im afraid you probably know as much as I do. I love the product, but dont know the ins-and-outs of it very thoroughly.
If youre talking about bounce rates in the context of Google web search and webmaster-y issues, then we really dont have specific guidance on bounces per se; rather, the key for webmasters is to make users happy so they find your site useful, bookmark your site, return to your site, recommend your site, link to your site, etc. Pretty much everything we write algorithmically re: web search is designed to maximize user happiness, so anything webmasters do to increase that is likely to improve their sites presence in Google.
The bottom line is that you want to do all the things that we talk about in Sticky SEO to keep people on your website, to engage them in your website, to send Google and other search engines signals that they found your website to be useful. And, of course, you want to reduce the number of visitors who send the search engines signals that your website is useless.
For those of you who feel more comfortable reading Japanese, and are interested in webmaster-related information from Google, and even learning about issues specific to our region and language, we hope you enjoy on our Japanese version of the Webmaster Central Blog
2009 Search Trends to Keep an Eye On Between the economy affecting stock prices and the potential mergers and acquisitions discussed among several of the major search engines, there is a lot of uncertainty as we head into 2009. Yet we can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we've seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:
2009 Search Trends to Keep an Eye On
Holistic -- In Every Sense
The word "holistic" should play out in a number of ways:
First, any significant media campaign or offline event drives search volume, so marketers must capture that demand by integrating search with other media planning.
Next, paid search and SEO should be planned in tandem for the best results. Several studies show that by integrating search engine marketing with search engine optimization, results are greater than the sum of its parts.
Lastly, expect the major search engines and others to push forward with new ways to infuse paid search listings with display and video media. This will make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. To some degree, these new search engine offerings will be motivated by more concentrated efforts to attract large brand marketers . Additionally, given how effective search engine marketing is, the engines and portals will want to have a steady stream of upsell options. In the coming year, consumers may experience the most dramatic shift in the format of search engine results pages since the basic template was established roughly a decade ago.
Search Fragmentation
While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.
This fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform. What's more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than both AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million). Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).
What does all of this mean for marketers?
It's true that not all queries are created equally. A searcher on a social network or video sharing site often wants something different than what theyre looking for on a standard search engine. But given the volume of consumer search activity (among other interactions) on these nontraditional search sources, it's important for marketers to be positioned the best way possible where those searches are happening.
New Models for SEO
These other search sources don't just operate in a vacuum; they impact the major search engines, too. Search engine optimization is shifting, from a focus of entirely maximizing a site's rank in the engines, to maximizing a site's reach across all the top-ranked listings on a search engine's results page. While many consumers go directly to a marketers' site, which should be positioned as prominently as possible in search engine results pages, many more consumers reach marketers through intermediary properties. These include blogs, social networks, photo sharing sites, Twitter, Wikipedia, and countless other social sites that tend to rank increasingly well in search engines. That means marketers have to shift their mindset from optimizing their Web site to optimizing their Web presence.
Your Car Engine's Your Search Engine
The biggest change in 2009 and beyond is that the device consumers search from will start to matter even more than which engine they use. Image via Wikipedia
The most obvious manifestation of this is mobile consumption. New mobile devices and platforms such as the iPhone and Google Android are focused on improving the search and Web experience. This will fuel searches from mobile devices; iPhone users enter a disproportionate number of mobile search queries, though other devices are catching up.
Marketers need to adapt their strategies to reach their target audiences on these devices, such as by optimizing messaging and landing pages, and providing more consumer value by leveraging the unique features of these devices. For instance, mobile devices support integration with SMS (text messaging), click-to-call, mobile couponing,
and location-based services, all of which take advantage of the mobile platform in ways that aren't as natural for PC-based Web advertising.
Over time, this trend of searches shifting beyond the PC will encompass far more than mobile phones. Consider the new set-top boxes and television models that make it easier to search from the TV, while delivering a hybrid TV-Web experience. Then there's vehicle telematics -- anyone who's searched for a restaurant, attraction, or drug store via a GPS device on the road will appreciate how valuable that can be. With all of these examples, and others to come, the device plays a significant role in how and why consumers search.
Google Search Quality Team is a Little Upset A recent post in the Google Webmaster Help forums was enough to make Google upset. A lot of speculations were made that Google was indulging...
...in those activities that it should not get into at all:
Can Ebay and others actively attempt to control and influence what shows up in search results whether they agree or disagree with it? Unfortunately, yes.
Do I hate Google for this? No. Its not their fault that the above mentioned websites, companies and politicians have found yet another way to censor the truth and anything they disagree with. - Bluegill
In response to this post Googler JohnMu wrote down four things that some people think Google is doing, but according to him, these are never implemented by Google ever! These include:
Large companies being able to encourage Google to change crawling, indexing or ranking of a site they don't like. Yes, they contact us, but no, they don't get any results.
A site being damaged with regards to crawling, indexing or ranking, by someone else on the outside. I've seen sites run into troubles for getting hacked, but I've never seen them run into trouble because of something someone other than the owner did outside of the site.
A spam report being taken seriously if the site itself was abiding our Webmaster Guidelines. 42,000 spam reports wouldn't change a thing, regardless of who filed them, if the site is compliant.
Obviously, any of these things could theoretically happen, but I haven't seen it happen, and I don't believe it's something a webmaster has to worry about. If it ever became obvious to Googlers that one of these things happened, it would be resolved immediately " so if you feel that it has happened, please take the time to submit a spamreport with the details. We take these reports very seriously.
We certainly believe Google on this aspect! Of course, the big daddy of search engines can not go wrong on these issues!
Datasets Program Stopped by Google Google is cancelling their Google Research Datasets aka Palimpsests program. Its aim was to provide large data sets for others to use. Wired in January this year...
Now, according to Alberto Conti, Google sent out the following mail:
Dear Google Research Datasets user,
Thank you very much for trying out Google Research Datasets, providing interesting datasets, and giving us extremely useful feedback. (...)
As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users.
It has been a difficult decision, but we have decided not to continue work on Google Research Datasets, but to instead focus our efforts on other activities such as Google Scholar, our Research Programs, and publishing papers about research here at Google.
The Google Research Datasets service will remain active until the end of January 2009 during which time any datasets may be downloaded. For those datasets that are impractical to download, we will also happily provide interested users with a copy via hard drive shipment.
Google confirmed the cancellation to me in a mail. Wired has a follow-up post about this with a quote from stem cell biologist Attila Csordas: Its a sad story if its true ... Assuming it is true that might mean that Google is still a couple years away from directly helping the life sciences (on an infrastructural level).
New Filtering Options for Google Image Search Google have announced a new range of filtering options on their image search functionality which should help searchers find the image they're after...
To give you an example of how this filtering works, here are the results of a search for "Christmas":
Clip Art
Photo Content
Adding this filter was a smart move by Google, as it's often frustrating wading through pages and pages of search results to find the right type of image. This filter should help users find the results they're after more quickly.
The good news for webmasters and image hosts is that there's no work required on your part to specify the type of image you're hosting. Google does all the filtering from their end so you won't have to worry about categorizing your images.
From the test I've done, this feature seems pretty useful and works quite well. What are your thoughts?Comments
The search numbers for November 2008 have been released after a large amount of search activity during the month. Overall search queries rose as a result of the U.S. elections and financial crisis, while Google's search share climbed even higher to a record 70.8%.
As we've seen in previous years, this also means that other search sites dropped slightly. One of the more significant changes I've noticed is the steady decline in Yahoo's figures which dropped from 23.5% in Nov 07 to 18.8% in Nov 08.
As noted on the compete.com blog:
Yahoo!'s search market share and query volume growth were essentially flat last month. This marked the third consecutive month when Yahoo!'s share has held below 20% and a new market share low for the embattled company.
Essentially, there haven't been any major surprises here other than the influence of MSN "Club Live" search. This is Microsoft's "live search club" which allows users to play games using the Microsoft search engine to win a range of different prizes.
In November 2008, Club Live added 2.6 percentage points and almost 300 million queries to MSN. This represents more queries than Ask or AOL. With these numbers included, MSN's search share looks a bit more impressive:
Of course, if you're looking to get your site included in any of the major search engines, check out our range of submission services!Comments
Google is rolling out some new features and updates of its Ad Manager.
According to the information on a particular blog, Google has introduced the following new features and improvements to the Ad Manager:
* Quicker way of checking ad operations such as order readiness, delivery status and inventory revenue performance through a new line item tab. A color coding scheme is also being used the delivery bars to help you identify line item pacing information as well as those line items facing risk.
* The ad managers getting started page was also improved with walk through step-by-step tutorials, and additional Ad Manager resources.
* Ad managers reporting are now more accurate and can now filter out clicks and impressions coming from internal traffic
* New platform for the Ad Manager Help Forum
* Opt-in feature for receiving additional periodic notifications that includes optimization tips, best practices, market research opportunities and other information
The Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can be used by Google Adwords advertisers for selling, scheduling, delivering and measuring their direct-sold and network-based ad inventory.
Google Blog Search Fixes Link Issue But Still Requires Help! Google recently confirmed that the search engine is in the process of fixing blogroll issue and will continue to use RSS feed to index the pages. At the same time it will try to exclude blogrolls and navigational elements of the blog as well.
Google Blog Search Fixes Link Issue But Still Requires Help!
The biggest issue under this aspect was that if you conducted a link command in blog search, such as link:http://www.pagetrafficblog.com/, Google Blog Search started to show blog posts that do not have any connection with your posts. Why?
It was due to the fact that a lot of blogs out there have this particular blog on their blogroll. But according to Google, that post should have a link within their post!
Now Google Blog Search is making certain changes to improve. What has Google really changed? Jeremy Hylton of Google Blogsearch said:
The basic approach is to analyze each blog to look for text and markup that is common to all of the posts. Usually, these comment elements include the blogroll, any navigational elements, and other parts of the page that aren't part of the post. This approach works well for a lot of blogs, but we're continuing to improve the algorithm. The search results should ignore matches that only come from these common elements. The indexing change to implement it is deployed almost everywhere now.
Forum discussion going on at Google Groups. So if you have any kind of issue, let Google know about it! This is the help they are asking from you!
Jawad Shuaib wrote a guest post for ReadWriteWeb today called What Yahoo Must Do to Survive, and I thought it was worth some comments as I have some disagreements with it. First, for disclosure purposes, I work for Yahoo! running the product marketing for our display ad platforms. This gives me some internal perspective, but also may leave me somewhat biased for many reasons.
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Google has updated its Toolbar Pagerank. A lot of people are talking about their PageRanks being changed. Sometimes the PageRank drops...
There are reports that Marissa Mayer is leaving Google. Barry Schwartz commented briefly about it today on SearchEngineLand and he points to...
There are quite a few others are making 2009 predictions. Ive never been big on that, but I have a few thoughts on what might happen to SEO/SEM in 2009:
Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.
I was reading Googles guide to SEO (pdf) , and its actually pretty good from a website or business owner perspective. However heres a quote I found...
Some critics maintain that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) can give away Gmail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, and all sorts of fabulous free tools, but the company's only really successful business is paid search ads. Those critics would not be surprised by Googles latest attempt to make some money from their massive investment in YouTube Inc.: paid search ads.
Regular readers will know that I have been in a somewhat involved debate on this blog and over at Sphinn on the issue of bounce rates as they might...
Between the economy affecting stock prices and the potential mergers and acquisitions discussed among several of the major search engines, there is a lot of uncertainty as we head into 2009. Yet we can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we've seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:
Google is cancelling their Google Research Datasets aka Palimpsests program. Its aim was to provide large data sets for others to use. Wired in January this year...
Google have announced a new range of filtering options on their image search functionality which should help searchers find the image they're after...
Google recently confirmed that the search engine is in the process of fixing blogroll issue and will continue to use RSS feed to index the pages. At the same time it will try to exclude blogrolls and navigational elements of the blog as well.
