Latest News from Search Journal

Chrome 19 Launches

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:42:00 EDT

Besides the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the highlight of today’s Google Chrome release is the addition of tab syncing to Chrome. With this, Chrome users can now have their open tabs synced across all of their devices, including tablets and phones that run the Ice Cream Sandwich-only Chrome for Android beta.

Yahoo’s New CEO is Toast: WSJ

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

Yahoo’s so-called ResumeGate has reportedly claimed its short-lived CEO Scott Thompson. In the midst of Mother’s Day – when, as she says, everybody’s at brunch – All Things Digital’s ace reporter Kara Swisher, who seems to know everything that goes on at Yahoo, said Sunday – based on what she’s been told by “multiple sources” – that Thompson’s stepping down after a mere four months on the job.

Google Adds More Semantic Smarts to its Search Engine

Thu, 10 May 2012 05:30:00 EDT

Google seems to be eking out a major new tweak to its search results. Reportedly spotted by several users, the search pages are now displaying semantic data nestled to the right of the regular results. Such information tries to tie in relevant facts related to the subject of your search rather than just providing links [...]

Yahoo Gets New Ultimatum

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:15:00 EDT

When Yahoo ignored Third Point’s ultimatum to fire CEO Scott Thompson for cause by high noon Monday Third Point read Yahoo Delaware General Corporation Law and demanded that the company open all its records about how it came to hire the man at the center of “ResumeGate.” It wants them ready for inspection and copying by Friday, another deadline. Section 220(b) of the Delaware General Corporation Law says any stockholder can inspect certain books and records of a public company on written request. If Third Point doesn’t get what it wants it will doubtless sue in Delaware’s reportedly stockholder-leaning Chancery Court. Meanwhile, the Yahoo board is supposed to be doing its own investigation of how it came to make a regulatory filing saying Thompson got an undergraduate degree in computer science and accounting from Stonehill College, a Catholic school near Boston, when it was only in accounting. Yahoo claimed last week that it was just an “inadvertent error,” but it appears that Thompson has been making that “inadvertent error” for years like at eBay where he was president of PayPal. In a letter to the board Monday Third Point said, “We believe that this internal investigation by this Board must not be conducted behind a veil of secrecy and shareholders deserve total transparency.” Third Point is Yahoo’s biggest shareholder and is embroiled in a proxy fight with the company aimed at filling four board seats with its own people. The hedge fund happened upon and immediately advertised the discrepancy in Thompson’s CV last week. It also discovered that the head of the board’s search committee Patti Hart fudged her resume too and claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics when it’s really in business administration. It wants her gone too. Third Point wants any records related to her appointment to the Yahoo board as well as any records of how Peter Liguori, John Hayes, Thomas McInerney, Maynard Webb, Jr. and Fred Amoroso happened to get board seats. If it gets its hands on the documents, Forbes thinks Third Point is going to find that Thompson wasn’t vetted at all; that no head hunter was involved; that there were no other candidates; and that Thompson simply reached out to the board and two weeks later was CEO. If so it will strengthen Third Point’s case of board mismanagement, an easy enough case to prove given Yahoo’s history. It wants the board to drop its resistance to Third Point’s nominees for the board which include Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb, Maeva Group CEO Harry Wilson, former MTV Networks president Michael Wolf and former NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker. Yahoo claims Loeb isn’t qualified to sit on the board. Meanwhile, and utterly coincidently, Yahoo is supposedly working on a new deal to sell maybe 15%-25% of its holdings in Alibaba back to the China e-commerce company. A deal, which has previously eluded the two companies, could reportedly be done in weeks. Thompson has supposedly been leading the latest negotiations. This deal is supposed to be simpler than the others they tried and would see Yahoo pay heavy taxes on its gains. Of course selling an increasingly valuable asset that’s supposed to represent a large part of Yahoo’s $18.8 billion market cap may not strike everybody as the sensible thing to do right now no matter how much Alibaba complains. Yahoo owns about 40% of Alibaba and the valuation is unclear. Its valuation last year was $32 billion. Yahoo hasn’t been able to bridge a “valuation gap” with Softbank, the majority owner of Yahoo Japan, so that deal’s going nowhere.

Why You May Be Screwed If You Don’t Take Google+ Seriously

Sun, 06 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

If you have recently checked your category’s Google search results, you may well have been as surprised as was when I recently checked our first page placement in the ‘content marketing’ topic.

OK, So Here’s the Plan: Yahoo’s CEO

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:20:00 EDT

Yahoo’s still wet-behind-the-ears CEO Scott Thompson, who just laid off 2,000 Yahoos to save $375 million a year, has laid out the gist of the expected reorg he has in mind for the joint, and naturally his internal memo escaped into the wild. Whether there’s a redemptive strategy in it to stop Yahoo’s revenues from being chipped away by Facebook and Google rather than just an exercise in moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic isn’t clear. In the memo Thompson confirmed what is already widely known: Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is leaving and taking the centralized products group with him. The company is supposed to be reorganizing around customers and starting May 1 it will be divided into three operating groups – Consumer, Regions and Technology – “charged with delivering the best customer experiences.”

Five Free Tools for SEO Success

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:15:00 EDT

Before hitting this list, be sure you’ve done your keywords homework. It’s really pretty simple: make a list of the keywords relevant to your product or service. These are the words used to describe what you are offering and the words and phrases prospective customers are putting into search engines to find you. That’s really the long and short of it. What are you selling that you want people to find and which keywords do you stand a chance of placing for organically. Answer that question with your keywords. When answering, bear in mind that there may be many a number of common words or phrases that apply! For example if you are selling USB storage devices, “aka flash drives,” you may also want to include such common words as “data stick,” “thumb drive,” USB key,” and the like. So look for these word clusters.

Now, having said that, it is important to note that you are likely to have competition for your keywords. The less competition, the more unique your keywords are, the more likely you are to rank well if you follow standard SEO practices on your website. So it is a bit of a trade-off. The more popular and competitive your keywords are, the more difficult it will be to rank well. But here are some important tools that will help:

1) Google Keywords Tool. In the world of SEO, who’s your daddy? Of course, Google. And Google has a keywords tool that is free to use. While this is tied to AdWords, it can serve as a guide for you to build your SEO strategy. Plus, it’s great for generating related keywords that you probably haven’t considered. And for sure, it can inform a paid advert campaign if you decide you want to take it to the next level, eg., beyond just “organic” search term ranking. We talked about the potential “Catch 22” of keyword competition, right? This tool will give you insights. See our example below from this tool where we’ve plugged in “SEO marketing development” for our keywords. We’ve set the option for the matches to be “loose” instead of “closely related,” and we can see that terms like “SEO Marketing Blog” have low competition but also relatively low monthly searches:

Meanwhile, we have our work cut out for us, if we want to compete for keywords like “SEO Services:”

2) If you’ve already established keywords and want to find out how your SEO strategy is working, the free Search Engine Genie tool is a must. Rankings for keywords tells you how you are doing compared to the competition. If you still have work to do, then it is time to pull out the heavy equipment and reassess your techniques. That’s what the next freebie does.

3) Not sure if your site is up to snuff with SEO practices? Again Google comes to the rescue with Webmaster Tools. This essential service reports on site health and will allow you to tame both title tags, H tags and meta descriptions. You already know that you should be using keywords in your URLs, page titles, etc., right? See the example below where redundant title tags are run amok:

As an added bonus, now Webmaster Tools works hand-in-hand with Google Analytics. To get started, you just need a Google login and to paste a small piece of “verification” code into your site. After the tool has had a chance to crawl your site, just use the reports and then find and fix these title tags by plugging in more specific key words for your content and you’ll soon be on your way to SEO success.

4) If you want to find out more details about how to write content and create links that will put your results higher in those coveted search result listings, you can’t do any better by following the free SEO starter guide. Many of the techniques we’ve already mentioned in previous posts such as using keywords in building page titles, headings and links.

The additional tips and tricks provided by this guide are an invaluable resource. Get this guide! Read it, study it, follow it – even print out all 32 wonderful pages if you must.

5) As we’ve enumerated here, there are just a TON of available resources to get you on your way to SEO splendor, but one offer you can’t beat comes from HubSpot, their blog and CRM integration tools will show you how to take your site to the next level, so if you dare to endure a Free Assessment, be sure and check out their free website evaluation offering.

Okay, check out all the great SEO tools listed above. If you have any questions afterward, of course we’d be happy to help you implement an on-page website search engine optimization strategy!

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Enterprise Social Search – as a Service

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:45:00 EDT

Our next upcoming best practices white paper is going to be called ‘Cloud Computing and the Drummond Report‘ – A special feature on how Cloud might be employed to help realize many of the cost-saving goals recommended.

Google Buys More Patents Off IBM

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 06:15:00 EST

IP-short Google has gone back to the Big Blue well again for another 217 patents and patent applications. The transaction turned up in a search of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s patent assignment database the other day by SEO by the Sea, the blog that has been keeping tabs on the IP transfers that have been going on between IBM and Google for at least the last eight months. The PTO’s records show that Google has bought over 2,300 patents from IBM on undisclosed terms. The latest deal includes patents related to wireless phones and JavaScript widgets. Bill Slawski, who writes SEO by the Sea, says the 188 patents and 29 patent applications cover a “broad range of topics, such as presentation software, blade servers, data caching, server load balancing, network performance, video conferencing, e-mail administration, and instant messaging applications. A number of the patents cover specific Internet, phone and mobile phone technologies as well.” Florian Mueller, who’s been following Google’s patent travails, figures Google, with IBM’s connivance, may be building up to file suit against Oracle using IBM’s database and enterprise software IP in retaliation for Oracle’s Java suit and its recently revised (upwards) demand for $2.7 billion in patent damages alone and that’s before trebling. No figure has been put on its copyright claims. For a selected list of patents in the latest cache see www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/ibm-assigns-patent-filings-to-google/. The December 28, 2011 deal was recorded by the PTO on December 31.

Google Confirms FTC Investigation

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 04:00:00 EDT

Google has confirmed in a regulatory filing that the Federal Trade Commission means to investigate its search and advertising business for abusing its dominance like the European Commission is doing. It got the subpoena last Thursday, the day the Wall Street Journal reported that the shoe was about to drop. Subpoenas to competitors and customers will follow. Observers like the Journal immediately drew comparisons to what happened to Microsoft and suggested that Google could be defending itself for years, condemned to distraction while facing a nemesis like Facebook.

Google Sued for ‘Suffocating’ French Rival

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EDT

Google’s been sued in Paris for anti-competitive behavior by 1plusV, a French specialty search firm that also complained to the European Commission last year and again this year about the search giant’s alleged habit of blocking rivals and depriving them ad revenues by manipulating search results. It’s asking for €295 million (~$424 million). Its beef goes back four years. It claims Google blacklisted 30 of its search engines from 2007-2010 and pushed its own services instead. Besides the EC probe, Google is now being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission for the same thing. Google owns at least 80% of the European search market.

FTC to Investigate Google for Antitrust: WSJ

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 06:00:00 EDT

The shoe that’s been dangling at the end of Washington’s toe for ever so long has finally dropped, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly ready to serve Google with civil subpoenas, kicking off what the paper says will be a “wide-ranging, formal antitrust investigation into whether the search giant has abused its dominance on the web.” Google should get served with demands for information in days. Competitors and customers will get theirs later.

The Importance of a Link Building Service in SEO

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 07:33:00 EDT

Those who are into search engine optimization typically do a lot of activities to enhance the web visibility of the client’s website. They will change the meta tags, particularly the title, description, keywords, and the alt tags. They will change the HTML coding of the page to make it easier for the search engine robots to spider through it. Some SEO professionals will even remove tables, frames, and flash files to better the prospects. There are those who will write a lot of content because content always does well with the search engines. Some people will even try to spam the search engines by including the keywords deliberately. There are other issues too such as social media marketing, viral marketing through YouTube and other channels, and others like this. But among them all, link building service probably remains as the most important.

Google Introduces "Best Guess"

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 04:05:00 EDT

Try searching for “The capital of Oman”. What do you expect to see? Couple of sponsored link followed by ten resultant pages – right? When did Google introduce this feature? It was done quietly. There is a news item on 23rd March, 2011 in Realwebseo talking about this feature. When did IBM Watson win Jeopardy! – 16 February, 2011. Do you see the connection? In the post How intelligent are the Computers of 2011 I had asked the question “Why has Google not attempted something like this?” Now we know that the option (2) to be right answer.

Why You Won’t Care that the Net Isn’t Neutral

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 09:18:00 EDT

It’s very simple. Once we have lost Net neutrality and the access providers are given a free hand to charge Internet companies for delivering their bits faster and more reliably than their competitors’ bits, we will experience this simply as how the Internet works, not as an artificial constraint put in to benefit the access providers. With so little competition, the access providers will be able to jack up fast lane prices as high as the richest players in the market can bear. So, let’s say Google decides to pay the access providers for “fast lane” service, but Bing does not. You’ll notice that Google results fly in, while Bing seems to be having trouble digesting its oatmeal. You won’t know if that’s because Bing’s search engine is slower or because it didn’t pony up for fast lane service. All you’ll know is that you’re not going back to Bing.

Google Gets ITA & Maybe More Trouble

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 12:00:00 EDT

Google got its way. The Justice Department isn’t going to oppose its $700 million acquisition of ITA Software, which provides the data for airline tickets to airlines and online travel companies, a purchase the agency has been reviewing since last July. But unlike Google’s equally opposed $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, the display ad house, in 2008 or its $750 million acquisition of AdMob, the mobile ad company, last year, the DOJ put strings on this one.

Google Could Face FTC Antitrust Investigation: Bloomberg

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 02:00:00 EDT

Already under investigation for antitrust in Europe, Google could face a broad parallel investigation of its dominant search business in the US by the Federal Trade Commission, Bloomberg said Monday quoting two unidentified people “familiar with the matter.” A heck of a way for Larry Page to start his run as Google’s new CEO. Looks like Eric Schmidt stepped down just in time.

Friendly URL Redirection Scaling via iRules

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 07:06:00 EST

The concept of a friendly URL is a pretty simple one. Basically you want to make things in your application, on your website, etc. easier to access. This stems from the fact that most applications these days make use of increasingly complex paths for a multitude of reasons. Whether it’s user specific content, auto generated pages or otherwise, typing in a URL that looks like “http://domain.com/a7391/users/0928179/events/live/release/20110403/regions.php?region=atl” isn’t something that’s easy or frankly even realistic for a user. I’m not going to remember that URL, and if I’m an 8 on the geek scale, certainly the 3s and 4s of the world won’t be able to manage that kind of a URL either. Nevertheless, these sort of paths are common amongst robust applications.

Kryptonite and SAT Analogies

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:15:00 EST

I was listening to the most recent TWiT where there was discussion about the recent algo change at Google. During the conversation, there was an off-hand comment about whether or not the following relationship held water. That one kind of bent my mind around a bit. There isn’t any new thought here. Social is presenting all kinds of problems for Google, and despite their success in South America and some other locales with Orkut, they really haven’t made much of a dent in social. A fact made more known by the recent additions of the talents of Marissa Mayer to the task. Some have argued that social isn’t in the DNA at Google, and that’s the source of their problems. It’s not too hard of a stretch to make the same claim about Microsoft: that we never had search in our DNA.

Combination of SEO Strategies Is Required for a Website

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:24:47 EST

Search engines develop new algorithms and vary them constantly and you have to react extremely rapidly. In doing so you must know how to do it properly. Read here and you can get a good portion of useful information. The majority of businesspeople know that inside the complex an entire world of Seo, rapidness together with efficiency carry out the most essential aspect. Yahoo and google cultivate completely new algorithm methods and even range them frequently and also in order to react remarkably extremely fast. On the process you can actually use knowing about it, keep the face to face the heart rate so when possibilities happen to do good opportunity to take care of exceptional search engine ranking postures. Msn many defiantly values trustworthiness, timeliness as well as success. So your key question for you is the correct way most of these tasks band together within internet as well as the best way you'll be able to utilize all of them in practice. You will find huge assortment with strategies and instruments utilized by SEO Birmingham gurus.

Is SEO a Simple Thing?

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:20:14 EST

Precisely what can Web optimization really imply and even carry out the fact is? This issue matter has been revealed greatly. Even so, it's still an appealing and today's technology that requires quite a lot of know-how in addition to hard work. Often, SEO Birmingham can be your primary way to achievements. Internet site frequently will depend on Search engine optimisation and just how very well it does work, SEO Birmingham contains the creative art regarding including the appropriate important terminology and wording to the appropriate websites and a knowledge or simply capability to pick up high quality link exhange. Very well, certainly this seems classy and fairly simple, though the most effective way to see whether it be basic or not satisfying you may be to glimpse and employ google. You will find there's superb, plenty of web-sites browsing on inside the full locations of world-wide-web, but basically couple of these products attract the best search engine ranking postures so are seen by most people. And here is then this correct answer, the highest 10 and this also is kind of complex mountain peak to climb. Let's know more of many intriguing elements of this; the career associated with key words could vary, though the most effective place of them all is at the foot of a written piece. Of course, you could insert all of them any place in the article, nevertheless the most effective approach would be to put them towards the end regarding text message. About the webpage, try to spot key words within the leading left corner, simply because this site grabs any clients` awareness.

Google Integrates More Social Search Features

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 00:57:00 EST

Google has overhauled its social search functions and now integrates Twitter, Flickr and Quora results throughout the page. An annotation system will mark specific links that a friend has shared if you are logged into your respective social media accounts. Unlike Bing, Facebook “Like” data is surprisingly missing from the results, but the new features [...]

JCPenney's Search Engine Optimization Debacle

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:00:00 EST

No doubt by now you would have heard of the black hat search engine optimization (SEO) tactics JCPenney’s pursued in order to be ranked well for various search terms particularly in planning for the 2010 holiday season. The news was uncovered by the New York Times in quite a bit of detail. Their investigation found thousands of unrelated web sites in the retail industry were linking JCPenney.com. The process was done by linking very specific keywords and based on the detail of these links someone planned this process. While JCPenney’s SEO company was apparently fired for this incident, I find it difficult to believe that someone at JC Penny would not have known about this strategy.

Google Prepared to Change Its Algorithms

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 16:45:00 EST

Google is trying to sweet talk the European Commission out of declaring Google an abusive monopolist but has yet to put a concrete proposal on the table according to Reuters. The EC has been investigating the company since three European concerns, including a Microsoft subsidiary, filed complaints about its Google-preferring searches. A decision could take months. Out-going Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph that he’d be willing to change the company’s search algorithms to avoid an antitrust finding.

The Magic Formula of Great SEO

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 05:30:00 EST

This weekend I looked back at SEO related statistics for a B2B website I launched in November of 2009. A full year has passed and I wanted to see the progress this company made over a twelve-month period. After launching the new WordPress website, the client retained me to work on their internet marketing efforts. It helped ...

SEO Site Audit and Analysis

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:37:33 EST

A SEO audit is the first step towards formulating your SEO campaign. An audit should provide a detailed review of where a website is currently at in regards to its on-site and offsite optimization. Every SEO company should provide an audit to their clients as a point of reference to jump off from. After analyzing a site's weaknesses and strengths, it is then time to prioritize the strategies that will need to be implemented in order to improve the organic search rankings and overall visibility.

Is Television in Eric Schmidt’s Future?

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:00:00 EST

Outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt is only going to stick around as executive chairman for a year after he turns the company over to co-founder Larry Page, 37, on April 4, according to the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, who wrote the book "Googled." Eric reportedly started getting antsy after he lost the China uncensored search battle last year to Page and Google's other co-founder Sergey Brin coupled with Facebook becoming the hot technology shop where the top engineers really want to work while Google looked increasingly bureaucratic and governments complained about privacy and copyrights. He was tired and couldn't "re-energize."

Schmidt Out as CEO of Google; Larry Page To Take Over

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 04:30:00 EST

The Google boys are growing up. They’re bouncing their adult supervisor. CEO Eric Schmidt, who twittered “day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!,” will cede his title to Google co-founder and president of products Larry Page on April 4, the company said in a surprise announcement Thursday. “Larry is ready to lead,” he said. Schmidt will remain executive chairman, focused, he said, “externally, on the deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership that are increasingly important given Google’s global reach; and internally as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.” Eric said it’s an effort to streamline the company’s clumsy three-way management structure and speed up decision making. In a statement he said “the triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and accountability at the top of the company.” There was immediate speculation that the shift is connected to Facebook now being the world’s most visited web site. Eric suggested he will stick around. The shakeup announcement came within minutes of Google posting handsome earnings of $8.75 a share versus estimates of $8.09 on revenues of $6.4 billion. Whip lashed, Google’s stock didn’t know which way to go.

Google May Have to Disclose Its Precious Algorithms

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 17:00:00 EST

Europe’s antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia told the European Parliament Tuesday that the Google investigation is likely to be a “difficult case,” Bloomberg said, and apparently one that absorbs a lot of resources. The European Commission couldn’t say whether Google will be forced to tell regulators – and from there everybody else – all about its precious search algorithms said to be as closely guarded as the recipe for Coke. Google is also facing national antitrust probes in Germany, Italy and France. Google owns more than 90% of the European search market. The Justice Department was officially apprised of the EC’s investigation.

Google Reportedly Ready To Blow $6 Billion on Groupon

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:25:00 EST

Google is reportedly ready to shell out $5 billion-$6 billion – evidently more like $6 billion – to buy two-year-old Groupon. The All Things Digital blog says the bid works out to $5.3 billion down and $700 million in earnouts unless negotiations fall apart. That’s more than Google paid for any other acquisition. It only spent $3.1 billion on DoubleClick and $1.65 billion on YouTube. Naturally there’s talk it’s overpaying.

EC To Investigate Google for Antitrust

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:36:00 EST

Google’s luck dodging formal antitrust investigations has finally run out. The European Commission said Tuesday that it will investigate charges Google has abused its dominant position in search by closing out the competition.

How We Improved Our Web Site Performance Rank

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:48:22 EST

Timed with our new product launch we also updated our corporate website. Not only did we update the content, we also applied some of the Best Practices that Alois and I have been talking about in the past 12 months. When we introduced the new Performance Report in dynaTrace AJAX Edition 2.0 Beta we got feedback from several community members who tested this feature on our website. They showed us that our website didn’t really do that well in the ranking. The Rank we had back then was somewhere between C and D. The first thing I therefore did after the site was launched was to look at the Performance Report of the main landing pages of our new site to see whether our improvements made a difference:

Regional Search Engine Optimization

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:40:02 EDT

Here there are some recommendations on how to promote your UK SEO with the help of region-oriented sites. It goes without saying that trying to find a specific or certain kind of service you are looking from a local company will mean that they would have had to have localized their SEO in order for you to find them. For example if you need a good auto repair shop so you will be looking for such that has uniquely easy accessibility otherwise this service won't be at all useful for you. Thus your business site has good and valid reason to be in the first place orientated towards local potential clients and thus be profitable. Regional Search Engine Optimization doesn't concern big companies that implement their services all over the country and abroad, however those that are aimed at clients of a certain city and the residents of the suburbs have great need for their sites to be regionally optimised. In this case they will have high rates from their return on investment.

What You Need to Know About the Evils of Firesheep

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:01:00 EDT

Firesheep is a great new plugin that works in the Firefox browser. It is easy for you to install, easy to run, and gives you, and just about anyone else, the power to do pure evil using just your browser and a laptop. With this post I’ll explain some of this evil and offer some thoughts on what it means for CTOs.

Beware of Any SEO Firm That Promises Zillions of Free Links to Your Site

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:25:00 EDT

External links to your site from high quality, relevant websites are one of the best ways to generate great search results. Why? Because, from Google’s perspective, your site ranks better if lots of your well-respected peers consider your site worth linking to. It’s like being friends with all the cool kids in high school. [...]

Bounce Rate and Its Meaning

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 12:41:00 EDT

In Google Analytics, there is a somewhat mysterious metric called the Bounce Rate. The meaning of the bounce rate is defined by the number of people who look at one page and then "bounce away" to other sites. Wikipedia has a decent definition. As always, Avinash Kaushik has a great article on it as well. My definition is this: Bounce rate = how much your website sucks Now every web sites sucks to some degree, but it is only a question of how much. No site will ever "not suck" with a 0% Bounce Rate. The goal is to "suck less."

Sophia Launches Sophia Search for Intelligent Enterprise Search

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:57:49 EDT

Sophia, the innovation leader in contextually aware enterprise search solutions, today announced Sophia Search, a new search solution which uses a Semiotic-based linguistic model to identify intrinsic terms, phrases and relationships within unstructured content so that it can be efficiently recovered, consolidated and leveraged. Using Sophia Search, organizations are able to minimize compliance risk and reduce the cost of storing and managing enterprise information. Sophia Search is able to deliver a three-dimensional solution to discover, consolidate and optimize enterprise data, regardless of its data type or domain.

GoDaddy Reportedly For Sale

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 02:30:00 EDT

Privately held Arizona-based GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest registrar of Internet domain names, figures it’s time to cash out and has put itself up for auction. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, says it could fetch more than a billion dollars.

Paul Allen Sues Everybody Who’s Anybody over Patents

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:30:00 EDT

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen lodged a patent suit Friday against AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and Google subsidiary YouTube. Microsoft is noticeably not named and reportedly has no license to the widgetry. It does own a piece of Facebook, however. The motley 11 are charged with infringing four basic e-commerce and search patents that belong to the Allen-owned Interval Licensing LLC, all that remains of the now defunct Interval Research Corporation that Allen and David Liddle started in 1992 to do advanced next-generation R&D.

The Google AdWords Broad Match Modifier

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:16:00 EDT

couple of months ago, Google added a modifier option for the Broad Match type. This option basically allows you to control which words must appear in exact or synonymous form within the search phrase. For the record, I have always disliked the Broad matching option. Especially since Google introduced Expanded Broad matching where Google show you ad for every word they deem close enough to the actual word you bid on, not just the exact word. Ever since they did that, it's become very difficult to control your Adwords campaigns because the search phrases you bid on become much less targeted and cost you many irrelevant click$. The new Broad match modifier is a step in the right direction as it allows you to better control the phrases that bring up your ad.

Yahoo Japan Bolts to Google

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:45:00 EDT

Yahoo Japan, which is actually controlled by Softbank, not Yahoo, and has ousted Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang on its board, has spit in the eye of the hard-won Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance, opting instead to go with Google. It said Microsoft’s localized search widgetry wasn’t good enough. Unbelievably to many observers, the pair came to the party with a tame regulator in tow. Japan’s Fair Trade Commission basically said Wednesday that it didn’t care that the deal would hand the whole of Japanese search to Google because they’re “doing search and ad business separately.”

Google Launches New Font Previewer

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:00:00 EDT

Google has launched a new feature for the Google font directory. The new Google font previewer lets you test drive all the fonts in the directory so you can decide which web font in the Google Font API works best for your requirements. Whenever you visit the font family page of any of the fonts, you will see a link saying “Preview this font” that will load your font selection into the font previewer. You can edit the text, change its size and line height, and add decorations and spacing among other things. You can even apply text shadow to your text.

Consumer Watchdog Poll Finds Concern About Google’s Wi-Spy Snooping

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:26:00 EDT

A significant majority of Americans are troubled by recent revelations that Google's Street View cars gathered communications from home WiFi networks, and they want stronger legal protection to preserve their online privacy, according to a national opinion poll released today by Consumer Watchdog. While Google received an overall 74% favorable rating, nearly two-thirds of those polled (65%) say the Wi-Spy scandal is one of the things that "worries them most" or a "great deal" with another 20% saying it "raises some concern" when considering Internet issues. The poll, conducted for the nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest group by Grove Insight, Ltd., found a solid majority (55%) is also bothered ("one of the most" or "great deal") by Google's cooperation with the National Security Agency without saying what information is being shared. Even more voters call for Congressional hearings on "Google's gathering data from home WiFi networks and its sharing of information with U.S. spy agencies like the National Security Administration, the NSA" (69% favor, 19% oppose).

Search Engine Promotion Advice for VARs and Channel Partners

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:58:18 EDT

Search engine optimization is an absolute must for any business. It’s a low cost way of generating sales and in building credibility. Quite simply, SEO has been the single most effective new small business marketing tool to come out within the last 15 years. However, SEO does pose certain challenges for VARs and IT consultants. Search engine optimization is normally used to attract a worldwide audience. But most IT services companies operate locally. A business in this space that wants to market themselves through the search engines has to streamline their process in such a way that most of their efforts will target a local audience.

EC in Preliminary Google Probe

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:15:00 EDT

The European Commission’s new antitrust czar Joaquin Almunia indicated Wednesday that Google may face a full-blown investigation into charges brought a few months ago by Microsoft, British price comparer Foundem and French legal search engine ejustice.fr alleging that Google had demoted rivals in its search rankings. He said at a conference hosted by University College London that “The work is at an early stage, but given the importance of search to a competitive online marketplace, I am looking at the allegations very carefully.” The Financial Times says the regulator is still collecting data and is in touch with Google, which maintains that results are controlled by algorithms. The Wall Street Journal says the EC isn’t sure Google is truly dominant and that the answer may rest with the barrier to entry, how easy it is for consumers to switch and the company’s power in adjacent markets.

[Updated] Google Twists in the Wind over Beijing

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:15:00 EDT

Google's quixotic and poorly executed attempt to do business in China on its terms rather than the Chinese government's has suffered another serious setback. Google's Internet Content Providers (ICP) license to run google.cn expired on Wednesday and the Communist regime told the company it won't be renewed if Google keeps automatically redirecting google.cn search traffic to its uncensored Chinese language site in Hong Kong. That's where Google unilaterally retreated to in March after the government called its bluff on leaving the country if search was going to be censored. Now Google hopes that if it puts up an intermediate "landing page" where users have to click on the message "We have moved to google.com.hk" it won't get kicked out of the largest, fastest-growing Internet market in the world on its ear. If the gambit doesn't fly, well, as its general counsel David Drummond blogged, "without an ICP license, we can't operate a commercial web site...so Google would effectively go dark in China."

Chrome Architect Jumps Ship to Facebook as Google Me Rumor Surfaces

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:00:00 EDT

Google has lost the guy who started and led its Chrome OS project to Facebook. Matthew Papakipos, who joined Google in 2007 when it acquired PeakStream which he founded, tweeted the news Monday morning, saying “Now that Chrome OS & WebGL are in good shape, it’s time for something new. I’m going to work @ Facebook! Love the product and team. Woot!” Google, meanwhile, is running up a Facebook clone according to a tweet Saturday by Digg co-founder and CEO Kevin Rose that said, “Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon ‘Google Me,’ very credible source.”

Google vs. Yahoo

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:46:58 EDT

In the same week that Google reveals plans to launch a system that will allow publishers to charge for content, executive business channel MeetTheBoss.tv sits down with Yahoo’s Jeff Russakow, EVP of Customer Advocacy, to discuss consumer satisfaction and engagement - and how to monetize for the web. According to reports revealed at the end of last week by Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Google will later this year launch an integrated payment system that allows publishers to use a single infrastructure for web, mobile and tablet to monetise their content. The news comes hot on the heels of moves by News Corporation to buy the 61 percent of BSkyB that it doesn’t already own, bringing the pay-TV operator completely into the fold: this, too, is matched by News International’s (News Corp’s main UK subsidiary) to place its newspapers behind paywalls and begin charging online users to access their pages.

Web Performance Optimization (WPO)

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:50:51 EDT

In his latest blog post, Steve Souders writes about the impact of performance on business success. I am not going to duplicate his content here as you can just go ahead and read his blog. I just want to highlight some very interesting points and give you some links to follow up resources. Performance Is Now Officially Business Critical Fred Wilson, a top VC investing in companies such as Twitter, del.icio.us, Etsy and FeedBurner spoke about the 10 Golden Principals of Successful Web Apps. The #1 item on the list was Performance: “First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it …”

Google Places Local Business Listing Availability By Country

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 21:00:00 EDT

Google Places Local Business Listing availability by country. A free service offered by Google Places and new countries are added by Google as they are made available through Google Maps.