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Posts Tagged ‘Google’
4 Things in ’08 That Changed the Face of Search
Christian Vuong | December 19th, 2008
What a year this has been! With 2008 drawing to a close, “Top 10” or “Best of 2008” lists are the way to go. ’08 bought about many changes to the online world, but without being to broad and I’d like to share 5 things I thought contributed to change in the face of Search. #4. The iPhone & Blackberry Why: Local SEO, Location-Aware Search, Geo-Targetted PPC Ads & Mobile Web Sites. 2008 was the year for the smart phone. While numerous manufacturers rolled out new models, it was Apple’s iPhone 3G and the Blackberry that took the spotlight. Apple’s iPhone claimed over 17% of the smart phone market in Q3 and Blackberry continued to roll out newer and faster models such as the Storm and Pearl Flip. What these devices highlighted was the emergence and public adoption of mobile web browsing. Mobile browsing was no longer for just for the businessperson, but for the average Joe the Plumber. Location-aware search also took center-stage with applications like UrbanSpoon, Around Me, and Google Maps (with the iPhone’s GPS). How exactly did this effect search? It further showed the importance of optimizing for local SEO terms and mobile friendly web sites. As CNet reported, Google is starting to display Sponsored Ads on the iPhone. In 2009, we’ll mostly see the rising importance of geo-targetting ads for mobile platforms. #3. Google Search Suggest & Yahoo Search Suggest Why: Long Tail Keywords Ok, this one is sort of cheating because Yahoo! Search Suggest has Continue reading…
Google Promotes Literacy by Stealing
Amanda Moshier | November 3rd, 2008
It’s a sad day when a mega-company like Google has to resort to stealing in order to get people reading. I commend them. Last week, after three years of litigation, Google announced a $125 million settlement to two class-action copyright infringement lawsuits filed against them in 2005, the first by the Authors Guild, and the second by five major publishing companies representing the American Association of Publishers (AAP). Plaintiffs claim America’s favorite search engine published copyrighted work online without obtaining the rights (see Google Book Search). Since it published only snippets of these works, Google claims its actions were in line with copyright infringement laws, but this proved to be a weak defense. About Google Book Search Launched in 2004, and with the eventual cooperation of over 28 libraries and 20,000 publishers, today Google Book Search publishes digitized snippets and bibliographic information for copyrighted works, previews of works included in their Partner Program, and downloadable full-text versions of works that have fallen out of copyright. Full-text searching of over 7 million books is available with links to purchase (or borrow) online. The $125mil settlement at-a-glance In the end, Google was able to compromise with the publishing industry. The result is an agreement currently under review by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. If approved, the agreement would: Give Google the right to publish out-of-print book, in-copyright books for preview and purchase in the U.S. Make it possible for users to preview, purchase, and in some Continue reading…
Chicken Little Didn’t Have Google: A Look at Search Marketing in a Challenging Economy
Michael Block | October 15th, 2008
by Michael Block Vice President, Client Services Wpromote, Inc. “The sky is falling!” –Chicken Little Generally, when it seems like the world is crashing down around you, in all actuality, it isn’t. The “sky” doesn’t simply “fall” of its own accord. It is important to remember that when Chicken Little was absolutely convinced that the heavens were careening earthward, the situation was no more severe than a simple acorn smacking her on the head as she ate her lunch beneath a tree. We are currently in the midst of one of the most tumultuous economic periods in modern American history. The era of the investment bank has ended, there is an unprecedented credit crunch in the global financial markets, consumer spending is down, home values have been falling and people are universally scared. Last week, the Dow Jones had its biggest weekly drop since 1933. Surely, this is no acorn! No, unfortunately, the current economic situation that is especially worrisome to small business owners is no acorn. However, it is the way that businesses react to these challenges that will determine whether or not the sky will fall on them. The common reaction is often to cut costs; one of the first victims of all the slashing usually being the marketing budget. This, in turn, reduces a business’s presence in the marketplace and sales will likely drop as a result. The short-term gains of cost cutting in this fashion inevitably lead to long-term losses in overall sustainability. It is a Continue reading…
How Google Ruined The Olympics
Christian Vuong | August 7th, 2008
The Beijing Olympics are just around the corner, the Olympic torch has made its way to the Great Wall, and the world’s eyes & TiVOs are all set to China. Unfortunately for many families, the recent Olympic ticketing scam (BeijingTicketing.com) has ruined their Olympic spirit. While Internet scams are nothing new, from those Brooklyn StoreFronts, to pyramid schemes, an Olympic ticketing scam of this magnitude has never been heard of. Let’s look from an SEO perspective of how BeijingTicketing.com, a web site less than 1 year old, overtook the #1 position on both Google and Yahoo from CoSport.com, the Official Olympic Tickets Sales web site. Note: The CoSport.com domain is over 9 years old. 1. Home Page Design CoSport.com From running a simple SEOMoz Crawl Test (viewable here) we can see the full web site itself is only 7 pages, and 5 of those pages include duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. Not a great start, but not necessarily the end of the world for CoSport. The linking structure found on the home page is another story. The web site is broken up into a 4 column layout with the left column acting as an information & sub-navigation bar. Let’s look at the three prominent columns on the CoSport.com home page: 1st column: This section focuses on telling the visitor about the web site, similar to a welcome message. 2nd column: This section focuses around a link that leads to another domain (JetSetSports.net) 3rd column: This section forces the visitor Continue reading…
Tags: beijing 2008, beijingticketing, cosport, Google, olympics, ticket scam, trust
Posted in Google, Internet News | 2 Comments
Tues News: 7/22
Michael Block | July 22nd, 2008
What’s new in the world of search marketing and the Internet in general? Well, it’s Tuesday, which means, of course, that it’s news day! Here are some of the more interesting stories from this previous week in online news: Yahoo’s CEO, Jerry Yang, and the rest of the board are trying some reverse psychology on Carl Icahn. Will inviting him to the board get him to let up on his crusade to oust the current regime? The Yahoo/MSN saga takes another unexpected turn. Rob Malda of geek favorite, Slashdot, goes on a tirade that I think just about everyone in SEO can agree with; i.e. Alexa is worthless, if not overrated. Due to the vast disparity of tech knowledge between Internet users and the flawed methodology invoked by Alexa, its clout seems nearly incomprehensible. SearchEngineLand.com provides us with a pie chart of what we already suspected: Google is still dominating. The Google, Yahoo, MSN breakdown is still around 60/20/10 and Google has broken 7 billion searches in a month. Wow! So, really, what’s new? Not a whole lot. Google is still king of the hill. Yahoo and MSN haven’t really resolved anything. Alexa? Well, it’s probably going to continue to cause people with only enough knowledge of SEO to be dangerous to give it more credence than it deserves. I’m not sure why people love Alexa’s simple-yet-useless ranking system, but, then again, I’m not sure what’s going on with this whole Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana thing. Does she get two paychecks Continue reading…
5 Reasons Small Business Web Sites Should Not Use Flash
Christian Vuong | July 18th, 2008
(photo: kevindooley) There’s been a lot of coverage in the blogosphere as of recent about the new friendship between Google & Adobe Flash. As reported in the Official Google Blog, the search giant has taken significant steps to improve the indexing of Flash files. Before, Google was only interested in indexing static text, but now will also index dynamic text. The specifics of exactly what Google will crawl and what it will give more value to have been discussed, yet much still remains vague. As a safe practice, small businesses wishing to be indexed high for important key phrases therefore should avoid developing Flash heavy web sites. (By Flash heavy I am referring to web sites that utilize a flash navigation, are fully built out in flash, or display the bulk of their content in Flash. This is not referring to flash banners or the auto-scrolling multihero) Here are five reasons why small business should stay clear of developing Flash heavy web sites. 1) Analytics Small businesses can benefit significantly from services like Google Analytics. With Analytics, business owners have the ability to monitor visitor web site usage, track traffic, and view what web pages are receiving the most clicks. While Analytics is capable of Flash Event Tracking, set-up is often more difficult than set-up on standard HTML pages. 2) Conversion Tracking Similar to Analytics, conversion tracking is often more difficult to install and monitor on Flash web sites than HTML web sites. For a small business with a limited Continue reading…
