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Bing Takes Baby Steps Towards Catching Google

Written on March 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

It’s always the darkest before the dawn.

Whatever the cliché being thrown around in Redmond, it must be working, because Bing’s US search share continues to nudge ever upwards.

According to comScore’s data, Bing climbed from 11.3% to 11.5%, likely stealing that share from the “we’ve given up on search” Yahoo, which dropped from 17% to 16.8%.

The only kink in Microsoft’s plan to catch Google? Google’s share increased too–up from 65.4% to 65.5%.

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Bing Takes Baby Steps Towards Catching Google

Why 6th Place in Search Might Soon Be a Player

Written on March 9, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: blackhat, seo

Right now, Ask, Bing, Yahoo and Google control 99% of the search market. In Europe, Google controls close to 90% of that.

That sounds like about the same market penetration that lead to the EU decision to force MS to offer browser choice this month on new machines.

But right now, most (all?) of those browsers default to Google search.

Europeans need more choice. Just like they needed choice on the browsers. On new machines, after they download whichever browser, they need a screen with the top 6 search engines and to ask people who will be their default search provider.

Even if the browser is Chrome.

It’s only “fair.”

What’s good for the Goose is good for the Google.

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Why 6th Place in Search Might Soon Be a Player

Introducing New Features for Open Site Explorer

Written on March 4, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, chat, seo

Posted by Danny Dover

Ballmer, Sitelinks & Other Favorites from SMX West Day 1

Written on March 3, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Posted by jennita

SMX West 2010 kicked off with quite a bang (or was that a yell?). Since Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer was the keynote, people arrived early to ensure good seats. The music playing before it started was amazing, it helped to create an excitement in the room that I really had never felt before a keynote before. I had attempted to save a seat for someone up front, but there was just too much demand and had to give it up. That’s the sort of thing that happens at a great concert, not a conference keynote.

There were quite a few live blogs of the event, but I had a few favorites from the interview that I wanted to call out.

1. He made it very clear that Microsoft is focused on the big picture and not just immediate goals. He spoke about continuing to move forward with a positive momentum and a differentiated point of view.
2. When the question came up of “Can you be #1 in the U.S.?” he essentially said “YES!” [and yes he said it with that exclamation] However he made it clear that it was a tricky question. If you say yes, you sound arrogant but if you say no you sound unsure of yourself. You don’t do things to come in second!
3. Danny asked “Is Yahoo! going to survive as a search player? You want to beat them aren’t you just going to kill them?” Ballmer could really only answer one way “No.” He stated that they wanted Yahoo! to do a good job, that there was lots of flexibility written into their contract and there was advantage to having the power of 2 as opposed to the power of 1.
4. When asked whether he was going to get on Twitter he said “I’m more of a webpage than a bunch of short tweets.” But then acknowledged that he did have a stealth Twitter account however only the people in his neighborhood followed him.
5. His favorite thing on Bing are the Bing maps. [completely agree here... the maps are amazing!]
6. What he thinks is the biggest opportunity in search: to “Help people get done what they’re trying to get done.”
7. Oh! And he gave us all his personal email account. You’ll have to watch the video to get that though.

All in all it was quite enjoyable to watch, although I was a bit unprepared (although perhaps I shouldn’t have been) for the yelling. Ok, I don’t think in his mind he was yelling, he was just talking VERY LOUDLY. But sitting right up front, I think we all sat back in our chairs a bit when he got excited and started to get louder. You can see the full video of the keynote below.

Google’s Personalized Search Revolution

Now that personalization has become an opt-out rather than an opt-in, I was really interested in what this session had to offer. The only speaker, Brian Horling who works in Personalized Search at Google, first gave a very informative presentation, then fielded quite a few questions from the audience. I really enjoyed having just one speaker who was focused on the topic at hand. The top takeaways that I got were some of the differences between a logged out user who gets personalized search versus a logged in user. Let me break it down a bit.

First of all, both types of users are thought of as two different identities to Google. Let’s say you’re logged in, and then log out, they don’t view you as the same logged in person. At that point they do look at the cookies set on your computer which tell gives them information on what you’ve searched for previously, which results you’ve clicked on, etc. For signed in accounts, your web history is saved indefinitely, but your non-logged in identity is only saved for 180 days.

Every user using search has the potential of seeing personalized search in some way whether it’s geo-location, web history, social search, etc. Personalization occurs about 1 in 5 queries for a user and the changes tend to be restricted to only a few results.

How can you control the personalization of your searches?

• Use search details
• Disable it by appending &pws=0 on searchs (you can find the bookmarklet to do that here)
• Edit or disable your web history

If you haven’t looked at the “view customizations” link I highlight above before, you should definitely check it out. Pretty interesting what’s going on there.

One thing that came up in this session was how do you explain to a client that the results they’re seeing aren’t the same as what everyone else sees. Although in some cases that would probably be a good thing since they’re seeing better rankings since they search and click on their sites more often than the average user.

How do you feel about personalized search? After this presentation I found that I was much more open to the idea than I was previously. I think because I felt like I finally understood a bit better where the data was coming from and how to turn it off. But what about you?

And so on…

The other session I really loved was “Supercharging Your Descriptions With Sitelinks” but as I was putting this post together I realized that should really a be a post in and of itself. It was great to hear from a Google rep about how certain sitelinks show up and ways you can enhance your site to ensure proper sitelinks. I have tons of screenshots and examples, so I’ll put them into a full post. Plus I’d really like to get Jerry Dischler (the Google guy) to answer a few of my questions. So watch for that one!

The best swag of the conference goes to Yahoo! for not only giving away these awesome coffee mugs, but for setting up a full-on coffee shop with baristas to make us our much needed lattes!

I really wanted to show the videos from the SMX Ignite as that was one of my favorite parts of the day. But unfortunately the videos aren’t live yet. Here’s a link to where they should be. Maile Ohye’s “DateRank: PageRank for singles” was my personal favorite, although all the speakers were exceptional.

Dana Lookadoo and I interviewed a number of people in sort of a Jay Leno “man on the street” sort of way. We hope to have the interviews up tomorrow.

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Ballmer, Sitelinks & Other Favorites from SMX West Day 1

Yahoo Founders To Sell Up To 5 Million Shares

Written on February 12, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

paidContent.org reports Yahoo’s founders will be selling up to 5 million shares of Yahoo stock. The SEC filing shows that Jerry Yang, the former CEO, will be selling 3 million shares and David Filo will sell up to 2 million shares.
Overall, in the scheme of how many shares both own, 5 million shares of [...]



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Yahoo Founders To Sell Up To 5 Million Shares

Google Buzz? MSFT, Yahoo Say ‘Been There, Done That’

Written on February 9, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

The dust is still settling on Google’s PR blitz today over Google Buzz, but that hasn’t stopped both Microsoft and Yahoo from speaking up. Their message is simple: been there, done that.
Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live, shared this statement with Search Engine Land this afternoon:
Busy people don’t want another social network, [...]



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Google Buzz? MSFT, Yahoo Say ‘Been There, Done That’

30 SEO Bookmarklets to Save You Time

Written on February 8, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Posted by randfish

We all work hard at the SEO process - analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today’s post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn’t completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don’t personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use.

Report: Google To Announce A More Social Gmail

Written on February 8, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object

There are several reports today that Google is set to announce a new social feature inside Gmail, allowing users to see (and add to) a stream of status updates from friends and connections.
While Twitter is all abuzz over the news, this is something that Yahoo Mail has offered its 300 million users since last [...]



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Report: Google To Announce A More Social Gmail

The ‘Information’ Age

Written on February 6, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo

Relevancy is a good thing. It makes search and the world more efficient. Many attempts at relevancy, like search is getting more social, may just create more noise. But computers are getting better at understanding language is a good thing “our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.”

But it seems each increase in relevancy justifies additional increases in irrelevancy to increase monetization.

‘Accidental’ Hijacking

Each individual piece sounds useful and helpful, but the end effect (and goal) is hijacking and misdirecting traffic to display more ads.

Search companies are hijacking publisher content to offer “answers” right in the search results, while testing displaying full images in the image search results.

Even when you claim your own business listing, Google will show your customers recommendations of other competing businesses on your business profile page. One of the best advertising based business models is extortion. And while the sum of the pieces may amount to that, certain ad networks are clever in how they tie it all together to *appear* innocent, even when acting like a shark.

What does a spam site do? Scrape content, misdirect visitors, and hope to get an ad click. Look at the above sequence through the same lens. It is the same thing - eeeeeeeeeevil.

SEO is Evil, Except When I Am Selling It!!!!

And yet a lot of the largest online spam publishers / scraper websites are taking a page out of Google’s book…call SEO professionals scammers selling snake oil, while building search arbitrage businesses based on stealing third party content and wrapping it in ads. Perhaps the goal of charlatan douchebags like Dave Sifry and Jason Calacanis are to promote the Google anti-SEO public relations messaging in hoping that Google will not burn their sites to the ground. It may well work.

A popular SEO figure who sold a content management system based on cloaking mentioned at a secret meeting amongst Google’s spam team and top SEOs that he loves turning in spammers. If he didn’t promote Google’s misinformed view he probably wouldn’t get away with a business model built on cloaking.

What are Technorati and Mahalo but glorified scraper websites? And yet to promote such trash they claim to be search evangelists fighting for the purity of the search results (while they scrape scrape scrape).

While publicly those people trash SEO, they sell SEO services, and a friend told me that they are even using high pressure telemarketing and email spam to pitch “services” … one such message I was forwarded stated:

Thanks for taking the time to review our new and improved demo. I’m glad you liked it and I’m forwarding you the PowerPoint version for you to truly experience the animation. Once you’ve distributed to the right parties I can always hop on a quick call to go through the demo really quick to really emphasize the value as an SEO component which is what the end result really is. Along the way you reap the benefits of having great content, a social media platform that all work to SEO and drive traffic. So even if up front the value is hard to fit into the normal SEO purchase, think of it as SEO with bells and whistles.

And as long as Google continues to rank the main scraper websites from such companies, that provides the proof of value which sells the garbage content to big brands. And so the above pitch was made by you-know-who, and Demand Media is going to start selling content to old media sites “One example Kydd mentioned was Demand’s partnership with the travel section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which, like most newspapers, is strapped for cash.”

Quick question: what is to prevent Demand Media from partnering with hundreds of such media sites to leverage the combination of cheap labor, keyword earnings data, the media site’s PageRank, and really just doing some serious damage to the search results? Unless the trend is altered, within 3 years almost any midtail to longtail keyword of value will have at least 7 of the top 10 results recycling the same poorly researched semi-legible informationless information.

All of the top Google search results say it is true. SO IT MUST BE!!!

AOL made a slight profit this past year and they are scaling a similar “content” business model, pushing tons of robo reporters to conduct flavor of the minute interviews.

Who Does This Hurt?

• searchers who may presume stuff in the search results is factually correct

• publishers which actually do real research and ensure their content is factually correct
• individual artists and authors who are experts but who are not hype driven & not self promotional enough to outrank dumbed down rewrites of their content heavily wrapped in Google ads

Recently there was an article about how fremium often does not work as well as advertised and the NYT highlighted Jaron Lanier’s take on the online social contract:

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

The above has been highlighted many times on this blog, but its damage has been far faster and far more widespread than even I anticipated.

Since Google is scraping so much CitySearch content, CitySearch felt the need to become a distributed content & ad network to remain relevant.

Strategic Advertising Fraud

Many solid publishers are getting lost in the ad mix:

The lingering effects of the economic recession, coupled with an expanding supply of efficient, and highly targeted online advertising networks, is reshaping the way big advertisers and agencies perceive the value of online media outlets. The result has been a pronounced polarization of the online advertising marketplace, with perceived demand rising for both the high-end of the most premium publishers and the low-end of ad networks and aggregators. This has caused perceived advertising value for the muddled middle of the marketplace - all but the most premium publishing sites, and the major online portals like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo - to erode, as the ad industry focuses its attention on the top and the bottom players.

Those ad networks are (of course) full of fraudulent distribution which helps make them seem cheaper than they are, while leeching off the legitimate publishers and driving down CPM rates on legitimate media.

Click fraud has hurt the Google network’s image, but a lot of it was isolated incidents from amateurs. While Yahoo! search got killed by fraud, Google still did pretty well.

But as Demand Media saturates their site the returns lower and they are in need of more links to get more “content” indexed. And so they are promoting a business model based on incentivized publishing, which includes both “The more high quality links to your article there are on the web, the more highly a search engine will rank it” and “Your family and friends are probably curious about what you are writing anyway. Send them links and invite them to take a look!”

Given that those author’s articles are hidden in the bowels of a large site (and that they are already being encouraged to build exposure), how big of a jump is it to assume that some of them will search for this or this? How many of them will create unofficial click rings? How many will ask friends to click an ad while they view it? How will Google be able to detect such activity given the big smokescreen such a large site provides? They can’t.

The Shifting Moat

As online ad networks become more polluted will that finally push brands into investing in top social media sites? Yes a lot of social media is seedy…but, increasingly, the “content” websites are not looking much better.

Who does the rise of content scrapers help? Those who are involved in the manufacturing of bulk misinformation, search companies which pay people to steal content and wrap it in their ads, and those who sell subscription content (well, up until some of the above outfits buy subscriptions to those sites to re-write and dumb down the content). In some markets (where the market leader is clear and obvious and oftenly referenced on the garbitrage websites) the backfill junk content might also help develop a competitive moat between the top brands and weaker competitors. It might also help some people involved in analytics, as more businesses need to squeeze every ounce of profit to stay alive.

Success from scratch in many polluted markets will require more grit, more scars, and better differentiation. As robotic content fills the search results, people will likely gravitate toward the expression of emotions. At the same time some employers are trying to prevent employees from having the opportunity to get their hands dirty, leaving an opportunity for competing businesses who want the additional exposure.

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The ‘Information’ Age

Yahoo Patent: Geotagging + Social = Augmented Reality

Written on February 3, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, Object, marketing

When you think about geotagging, what do you think of? GPS coordinates appended to a Tweet? Picking the location you took a photo on Flickr?

How about notes from your friends? As customary, the US Patent Office recently published a patent filed by Yahoo in July 2008, and in that patent, geotagging takes on a whole new meaning. Instead of assigning pictures a location, you can actually leave notes at a location, accessible via mobile, and networked with your friends. Want to let your friends know what your favorite restaurant is? Add a tag. When they’re in the area, their phone will let them know about your tag. And that’s just the beginning.

As Read Write Web points out, this dovetails nicely with another patent filed the month before—one that provides video, audio and other info pertinent to the user’s location. This latest patent builds on both these ideas:

The technology described in this latest patent isn’t just location-based social networking, or Augmented Reality “air tagging” – it includes social graph analysis, permissioning, expiration dates, contextual advertising and more. It’s not just text notes, it includes methods of augmented reality with photos, videos and more. While the most popular mobile augmented reality apps on the market today focus on text on top of locations – there’s no reason why reality can’t be augmented in other ways as well.

Notes can also be tied to non-stationary objects, including people (well, more likely their phones) and vehicles.

The patent is not yet granted—once a patent is published, the USTPO reviews it in due time.

Google has made a few location inroads—Latitude to publish users’ locations, a year ago, and “Near Me Now” to offer nearby business suggestions, last month. However, if Yahoo is currently developing the technology to make their patents a reality, Google has a long way to go to catch up.

Yahoo isn’t the first to develop solutions for augmented reality—but they might be the best known. With the huge userbase they already have, they probably stand a better chance than most of the competitors in the field.

What do you think? Will Yahoo pursue this technology—and if so, will they lead the way for mass adoption?

Continued here:
Yahoo Patent: Geotagging + Social = Augmented Reality