July 2007
Monthly Archive
Digg boots Google
Posted by Katia Pereria on 30 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Search Engine News, Social Media
Digghas announced that they are going to be booting Google as its online advertising partner and moving to a company Digg’s top executives described as “young and willing to take risks”: Microsoft Corp.
Doesn’t quite sound right does it?
I find this very interesting, great for Microsoft, not so great for Google. This is a huge blow and has created a lot of controversy amongst Diggers.
All was revealed two days ago when Digg co-founder Kevin Rose wrote this on his blog:
Brits love Google
Posted by Louis Venter on 27 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Hot off the Press, Search Engine News
A survey conducted by Bigmouthmedia shows that the majority of British internet users want Google to maintain its stance as the leading search engine in five years time.
Interestingly enough it’s men who have faith that Google will maintain their position as No1, whereas women were less convinced. A significant 40% of respondants were impartial and were unsure of whether or not Google would retain its position at No 1.
Why is Google so popular within the UK?
Can Facebook applications increase traffic to your site?
Posted by Katia Pereria on 26 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Social Media
Facebook with more than 32 million active users, and still doubling every six months, is the No. 2 social-networking site after Myspace. London recently overtook Toronto as the city with the most Facebook users.
According to The wall Street Journal, Facebook currently offers more than 800 new services, from photo slideshows to online file storage; this is up from fewer than 100 a month ago. Meanwhile, those who are creating the Facebook services can access information about their customers and make money by selling related items and ads.
What could Google’s next algo update include?
Posted by Louis Venter on 26 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: SEO Strategy, Social Media
With several key bloggers commenting that link authority is dead, (or dying) it’s perhaps a good time to start discussing what could replace or enhance it.
Firstly is it dying?
At the moment link authority forms a large part of the sites reputation in Google. With their not-so-recent campaign to target paid links that are purchased with an intention to transfer page rank, Google, IMHO has really set their stall in making sure the link authority part of the algorithm is here to stay. I believe that while it isn’t the best way to evaluate a website’s reputation on its own it will still form the backbone of Google’s algo for a long time yet.
Microsoft’s strategy to gain more searches
Posted by Katia Pereria on 24 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Search Engine News
With Microsoft’s recent launch of Vista, many people were anticipating a revival of MSNs presence in Search. Vista is still young, but there have been some significant increases in searches coming from Live Search over the last couple months.
According to Compete, MSN / Windows Live Search have posted a dramatic rise since last month and Google has dropped to 62.7 percent, down from a high of 67.0 percent globally (Google still dominates the UK search landscape). This is said to be due to the advent of the Windows Live Search club and the fact that you have to use Live Search to gain points. The aim is that you play games for points which you can redeem for Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine to get the points; you have to search with Live only. I think it’s sneaky but appears to be working at first glance.
Yahoo’s Search update
Posted by Katia Pereria on 24 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Search Engine News
So Yahoo is rolling out some significant changes to their web data and crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. Everyone is hoping that these changes improve the quality of the search results that Yahoo churns out. They launched Yahoo Search Suggest that searches for the correct words as you type a while ago. That added a fresh touch. I am quite eager to see what they hiding up their sleeves this time around.
What would happen if the Australian watchdog wins its case against Google?
Posted by Louis Venter on 19 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Hot off the Press, Search Engine News
News.com.au reports that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is suing Google over is misleading layout of the sponsored results section. In their eyes they fail to “adequately distinguish sponsored links from ‘organic’ search results”
Naturally Google said they would fight the case. Rob Shilkin, Google Australia’s spokesperson labelled the suit as “an attack on all search engines and the Australian businesses, large and small, who use them to connect with customers throughout the world.” I think that was perhaps a little strong, theyre just asking for more distiction arent they?
Networking with the right people – Sphinn
Posted by Katia Pereria on 19 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Social Media
A fabulous new site has been launched by Danny Sullivan – the site is called Sphinn (pronounced Spin) and it’s a Social, News and Networking site for the Search industry. Danny started Search Engine Land with the idea that it reflected a community, a place where people could meet, chat and network. The limitation of Search Engine Land was that it wasn’t very easy to comment on particular stories and news. According to Danny Sullivan, the man himself - Sphinn was designed for everyone to share and comment on news stories about search and interactive marketing using a voting model. The more votes, the more popular a story becomes.
Don’t forget your Varied Anchor Text
Posted by Phil Smulian on 17 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: Common SEO Topics, Link Development
Anchor text is the wording used to represent an active link visually on a web page. This is something that should never be overlooked at webmasters, because neglecting it can land the sub-pages of your website in the supplemental results (less important pages) of search engines.
Search engines crawl the web constantly, following links to find and index information within web pages to later provide relevant resources for peoples many various searches. They Index pages that contain text related to topics, and due to the massive amount needed to be processed in a very short space of time, a link may not be considered should it contain no anchor text.
Solution based SEO and why its the correct way to propose
Posted by Louis Venter on 13 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: SEO Strategy
It was both refreshing and exciting for me to read Chris Boggs’ post about the process they adopt in creating an SEO proposal. For the past three months, we at MVI Search have adopted a solution-based approach that is very similar to the approach that Chris describes.
Historically, most agencies that we have spoken to have been approached with a package that they “can adapt” to suit the needs of their customers. I believe that not only does this limit the success of the campaign but the most qualified person to make judgement calls within the strategy inherits the strategy already sold. There is often a lot of information lost in translation and the resultant strategy is poorly planned and in some cases impossible to achieve. The end result is an unhappy customer or agency and yet another company burnt by bad search marketing advice.
