Search Engine Marketing Resources & News

Search Engine Marketing News & Resources

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Google AdSense Updates Terms and Conditions For Gadget Ads & Privacy

Posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Google has made changes to the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions policy last night. The Inside AdSense blog said the changes were to include “future products and feature,” such as Gadget Ads and an update to the “privacy requirements.” The…

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Gmail Emojis

Posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Google at their Japanese blog (a couple of days ago as well as in January) announced support for emoji for Japan, and later other markets, BusinessWeek reports. Emoji, which according to Wikipedia literally means “picture characters,” are like advanced emoticons — small images such as “thumbs up” or “punch” or “heartbreak” to get a point across. Google Talk already has a limited range of emoticons (and there are hacks to get more smileys

Search Illustrated: How To Use Social Media Sites

Posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

As SEOs, we know that a little creative thinking goes a long way in using social media sites to promote a business. In one way or another, these collaborative communities provide endless opportunities for viral and word-of-mouth marketing.

This week’s infographic provides a handy snapshot of the top social media sites, what purpose they were designed to serve, and what other types of user interaction they support.

Click to continue reading…

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Google Talk Chatback Widget

Posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Google released a new “chatback badge” allowing your site’s visitors to chat with you, provided you’re logged in to Google Talk at the time. All you need to do is copy & paste a snippet into your site. You can change the title of the badge, also toggle whether you want your status message to show, and adjust your nickname as displayed to guests. (Note that someone can even launch a chatback when they’re not logged in to their Google account; the webmaster who included the gadget will just see them as “Guest.”)

Here’s a live example of the badge using the default widget settings, though I might be offline:

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Yahoo Buzz Launches: Votes, Searches & Emails Used To Rank News

Posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

As
expected, Yahoo Buzz has now launched
– a site where "buzz-worthy" news articles are highlighted based on user votes,
searching activity and email sharing. Hot stories on Buzz may also get featured
on the Yahoo home page, an added incentive to get publishers considering the
program.

Click to continue reading…

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Yahoo To Announce “Search Monkey” Enhanced, Annotated Results At SMX West

Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008

Today, at the inaugural Search Marketing Expo West conference, Yahoo plans to unveil a project code-named “Search Monkey,” a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific web sites.

The new enhancements differ from Yahoo’s “Shortcuts” that sometimes appear at the top of search result pages. Shortcuts are served by Yahoo whenever the search engine is confident that the shortcut links are more relevant than the other web search results on the page. Often, shortcuts highlight content from Yahoo’s own network of sites.

The new enhancements can be applied to any web site. Publishers can add additional information that will be displayed with the web search result. For example, retailers can include product information, restaurants can include links to menus, reviews, local merchants can display operating hours, address and phone information, and so on—far more information than a Title, URL and description that make up current generation search results.

“Traditionally, we talk about results and results only. The interesting thing we’re adding here is the ability to annotate someone’s results,” said Amit Kumar, product lead for the open search platform.

Click to continue reading…

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Andy Beal Launches Trackur For Monitoring Online Reputation

Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008

When monitoring what people are saying about you and your brand online, you have two main choices. You can use Google Alerts as well as search a variety of social media and social networking sites manually or you can pay a reputation management firm to do expensive monitoring for you.

Now you have a third choice. Andy Beal, who specializes in online reputation management, has launched a site called Trackur that enables you to set up monitoring across a variety of sites on a set of keywords at a much lower price than reputation management firms generally charge.

Click to continue reading…

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A Day of Pure Insanity

Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008

Posted by randfish

I’m incredibly tired. So dead, it’s hard to take out my contact lenses (you know how they stick sometimes? Yeah, I hate that). Here’s a log of today’s events:

7:50am - Wake up at hotel in San Francisco, shower
8:45am - Catch cab to International Orange
9:15-10:45am - Take first ever Yoga class (wow - it’s painful, and I’m the only male in the building) with Yoga instructor friend
11:00am - Catch cab back to hotel (why are there never any cabs in SF when you need them?)
11:45am - Check out of hotel and drive to Boulangerie for breakfast
12:45pm - Desperately lost in Sonoma County
1:15pm - Arrive at Skywalker Ranch (holy crap is it gorgeous!) with Jessie
1:15pm-4:00pm - Tour Skywalker Ranch (including seeing the grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and, weirdly, Jon Favreau, who’s also giving someone a private tour)
4:00pm - Sara from Edutopia (George Lucas’ Educational Nonprofit) gets me a replica Indiana Jones Hat (wow!)
4:30pm - Meet Jessie’s horse in Marin County (I’ve never touched a horse before - at least that I can remember)
5:00-6:00pm - Get lost on multiple freeways and streets in and around Berkeley (why can’t I figure out directions in the Bay Area?)
7:10pm - Arrive at SMX West Conferece
7:15pm - Accidentally call Matt Foster from ArteWorks SEO "Todd" - feel bashful for the rest of the night
7:30pm - Find out my dad is attending SMX Conference (he looks so dapper in a sportcoat)
7:45pm - Eat dinner with Will Critchlow from Distilled (we miss you desperately, Tom) and Miguel Salcido from eVisibility.
9:00-11:00pm - Drinks with Gary & Patrick from Ask.com. Gary, as usual, shows us that he is clearly a far better search engine than Google (not Ask.com, I mean Gary himself).
11:15pm - Run into Ken Jurina, but we both realize we need sleep even more than commiseration.
11:45pm - Bitch about social news sites with a brilliant programmer
12:00am - IM with Sarah Bird (who’s arrived safely back from Spain - hooray!)
12:30am - Realize with horror that something has to go up on the blog tonight, despite pain in all sorts of body parts I didn’t even realize I had
12:45am - Hope that Mystery Guest is having a great time in Italy, but miss her desperately

I’m a very, very lucky guy. I hope I can repay that gratitude in full someday.

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Daily Search Forum Recap: February 25, 2008

Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web….

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SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 25, 2008

Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

SEMPO Announces New 2008 Board of Directors
SEMPO has announced the 2008 Board of Directors that will take office on March 12, 2008. The board of directors includes:…
Ask.com Adds More Sponsored Ads, Pushing Organic Results Below Fold
I was messing around with the Ask.com interface on my Mac and decided to compare some results between my Mac browser and Internet Explorer for PC. I noticed that Ask.com is now displaying five sponsored results for many keyword searches. The organic results are now below the fold, like they…
SEOs Want The NOINDEX Tag To Not Show A Page In The Index
Matt Cutts of Google posted a blog entry asking SEOs how they want Google to handle the NOINDEX meta tag. If you use the NOINDEX meta tag now, Google won’t show the page in any way in the Google index — not even a “link only” listing. Matt asks SEOs…
Yahoo, You’re Not Off The Hook Over The Chinese Dissidents Case Says New Lawsuit
Yahoo Sued Again for Assisting the Persecution of Chinese Dissidents from the Epoch Times reports Yahoo is being sued once again for allegedly leaking personal information and aiding the Chinese Communist Party in Internet censorship and the persecution of dissidents. The China Democratic Party, China Social Democratic Party and the…
Pakistan YouTube Ban Propagates Worldwide Causing Major YouTube Outage
Yesterday, I kept noticing Twitters of YouTube problems. Soon after, the BBC reported YouTube outage blamed on Pakistan. It appears that the recent Pakistan ban of YouTube not only caused Pakistan ISPs to block YouTube but also spread worldwide and stopped users from even the United States from accessing YouTube….
Survey Says: Google Top Brand In UK
Google takes UK’s top brand spot from the BBC reports Google took the BBC’s top spot in a Superbrands survey of the top brand in the UK. In fact, Google is the only company established after 1990 that is found within the top 50 brands in this survey. Microsoft secured…
Hackers Launch Goolag: A Google Vulnerability Scanner
Hackers turn Google into vulnerability scanner from Techworld reports a group of hackers named Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) launched a search tool powered by Google to help see if your sites are vulnerable to a hacking attempt. The tool is named Goolag and by typing in a domain…
The Secret Of Large Term Lists (It’s All In The Bidding)
Last Monday, in a SEL post discussing the click quality by engine, I mentioned in passing an 89% drop-off between ‘phrases tested’ and ‘phrases actively generating good clicks’. Specifically, we posted 176,903 terms en route to discovering 20,152 active good terms for a client. Today I’ll revisit that drop-off…
24 Meets SMX West: Mike McDonald’s Funny Trailer At WebProNews
In a few hours, I’m jumping on a plane and heading out to our SMX West search marketing conference, which hits Silicon Valley from Feb. 26-28. My journey will hopefully be much easier than Mike McDonald’s. To kick off his WebProNews video coverage of the show, he’s got a spoof…
Microsoft’s Johnson: “Once Yahoo And Microsoft Agree On A Transaction”
This afternoon, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft Platforms & Services Division, issued an email to Microsoft employees (that was released via its PR firm). The letter has a tone of confidence that assumes a deal with Yahoo will ultimately take place. It reiterates what Microsoft believes to be the benefits…
Is The Time Ripe For Search Marketing Standards?
Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude. Albeit, we’ve seen some standardization steps taken by…