SEO Information and News Blog

Yahoo has made a deal (read: paid a bundle of cash) to be the default search engine on computers by HP, the second largest PC manufacturer.

This headline and lead sentence stolen from a post I did 15 days ago:

Yahoo Buys Default Search On Acer Systems

Yahoo has made a deal (read: paid a bundle of cash) to be the default search engine on computers by Acer, the fourth largest PC manufacturer. Okay, so Google got Dell (#1), Yahoo got Acer (#4), so who will get HP (#2) and Lenovo (#3)? I would be real interested if someone made a deal with Apple (#5), including for Boot Camp installs of Windows.

Sense a trend? While Google probably overpaid for Dell (whose market share is shrinking), Yahoo is looking to snatch the rest of the market. I still think buying the default search is just stupid, but at least Yahoo is being smarter at it.

Lenovo’s next. Who will close the deal first?

Tag: Google

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

CNET explains why search engines will never likely replace the expertise and personal touch you get from consulting a librarian. While the Web is good for offering quick

…results from a broad range of sources, which may or may not be trustworthy, librarians can help people get access to more authoritative information and go deeper with their research.

Link: CNET

And no article on search and librarians would be complete, without a quote from my pal Gary Price…

“For some people, if the answer isn’t in the first few results it might as well not be there,” said Gary Price, founder and editor of the ResourceShelf blog and director of online resources at Ask.com. “No matter how smart and helpful search engines get, they’re never going to replace librarians.”

Have a bookmark! –

“Disorganizing the world’s information and making it difficult to access.” That wouldn’t be a very good mission statement for a search engine, would it?

Bloggers Get No Love From Supplemental Index

We use Google’s own blogger product for this (PR 7, in business since 1999) website. We publish only actual content and make about a dollar fifty a year in ad revenue. In short, we’re not spamming the engine by posting frequently, so WTH? (That’s “polite” for WTF.)

A bunch of pages from this website (the top couple SERP’s here, for example) now seem to be in Google’s supplemental index and thus harder to find in search results. Why? I’ve heard other bloggers mentioning similar problems. Apparently blogs make it easier for spammers to publish, so the rest of us are obviously suspect. Grrrr….

Or, blogs create too many “orphaned” pages, with no links? This shouldn’t be true, as the linkage is built right into the archiving, and again, if it’s Google’s own blog product, they should have a pretty good idea of how that works. If you post 30 times a week, what are the odds that someone external to you will always link to everything and say “great post!”. Is that the only measure of relevance? Should we be forced to engage in stealth linking campaigns for every third post just to keep them out of supplemental?

Honestly, two-year-old posts from this blog should *never* go into supplemental. Why would they? Did something change? They were good enough to index before, so what’s wrong with ‘em now?

What’s maddening about that is when we contrive to publish certain posts as if they are “articles,” they tend to rank better. Anytime a search engine’s policy makes it useful to come up with such contrivances, they’re really not doing their job properly. A bunch of “well linked short articles” shouldn’t rank any better than blog entries. Again, the idea of blogs is a good one – it helps people publish without hassles.

The decision to publish something as an “article” rather than just laying back and letting the blog do its job as a superior content management system (well, I’m using blogger, so I wouldn’t quite say “superior,” but convenient and adequate) is not a “relevancy affecting” issue, it’s merely a content management decision. Is blog software so terrible as a content management solution? Of course not! It was invented precisely as a more accessible form of content management.

One reason content can find its way into supplemental can be “duplicate content”. Sometimes we allow others to republish our stuff (though rarely). But that’s not the only issue. I wish I knew what the real issue was. Likely, it comes down to the sheer volume of spam, link-farm-that-isn’t-a-link-farm–honest!, and scraped crap that gets thrown at Google on a daily basis, which means a lot of stuff is getting routed into Supplemental. I just fail to see how a single post on an older, trusted site, using Blogger, would meet that fate. There’s a 50% chance those posts might be useful to at least one searcher in the future, possibly even the President of the United States. There are many sites where that chance is closer to 0%… as in, well below 0.01%.

On a related note, the hack published over at SEOmoz that can help you discover how many pages you have in Supplemental doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

Bin Laden. Viagra. Hot Russian Brides. Peace out.

Have a bookmark! –

Students at the University of California, Berkeley can now make the claim that their higher education is brought to them by Google. That’s because Google Video is “delivering educational content, including course lectures and symposia, free of charge” as “part of UC Berkeley’s commitment to the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of our state, the nation and the world.”

“Because of the quality and quantity of these video offerings, UC Berkeley will be the first university with its own page on the Google Video Web site,” according to a press release. In terms of “quantity,” there’s a significant amount – “the campus is making more than 250 hours of content available to the public . . . “

Christina Maslach, the UC Berkeley vice provost for undergraduate education, was quoted in the release. “Google Video presents us with a wonderful opportunity to share UC Berkeley’s amazing faculty with a global community of lifelong learners,” she said. “We see this endeavor as one part of our expanding digital bridge that is directly connecting the public we serve with the intellectual riches of the campus.”

Google’s CEO seemed happy to help. Eric Schmidt did, as the press release noted, receive “both his doctoral degree (1982) and master’s degree (1979) from UC Berkeley.”

“Google appreciates the opportunity to partner with progressive universities like UC Berkeley to make undiscovered lectures and entire courses available to our users,” Schmidt was quoted as saying. “UC Berkeley’s content – much of which wasn’t easily accessible online – will enhance the comprehensive and diverse range of offerings by Google Video.”

UC Berkeley’s Google Video page is available here. I’m not suggesting that you watch all of Professor Marian Diamond’s 50-minute lecture on the muscular system (not that you shouldn’t – I have nothing against Professor Diamond), but it’s interesting to see what’s available. It may only be a matter of time before other schools follow suit.

Tag: Google, UC Berkeley

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Have a bookmark! –

Business Week takes a look at what’s at stake in the battle between Google and Belgian publishers.

Link: BusinessWeek

It’s an interesting read, especially when the publishers concede they’re getting a lot of traffic from Google then go on to use that as evidence the company needs to be stopped.

Since the Belgian court decision went into effect and Google dropped IPM publications, traffic to the company’s sites has dropped about 15%, le Hodey concedes. Yet that only strengthens his sense that Google should be checked before it gets even more powerful.

BW also gives us an explanation of what the Europeans are trying to create with their Robots.txt alternative.

…a set of sophisticated software “tags” readable by search engines’ Web crawlers that would automatically tell aggregators under what terms they can use editorial content.

Why doesn’t Google just remove every European publishers content from their index, then they can spend their time creating a tag that will beg them for mercy.

Comments

Tag: Google

Have a bookmark! –

The fruition of Yahoo’s Project Panama the name for their new paid search ad platform initiative, may at long last be revealed to the impatient advertising masses.

Link: Project Panama

In a SEMPO-hosted event, Yahoo demo’d the new ad platform via Webex to an eager audience of search marketing professionals. The event titled, an “Early Look at Yahoo! Search Marketing’s New Platform” was given by John Kim, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Yahoo! Search.

Mr. Kim revealed that the current paid search platform that Yahoo uses dates back to the days of GoTo.com (GoTo.com is the Internet’s first pay-per-click search engine which later became Overture and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003). Though the concept of paid search marketing was innovative back in 1999, when GoTo.com launched, the DirecTraffic Center (Yahoo’s current search ad platform) is clunky and cumbersome to use compared to Google and MSN.

Project Panama has been underway for two years, and Mr. Kim announced that it will be released to the public some time in Q4 2006. It was initially scheduled for release in Q3, so all bets are on at this point.

A few of the new features that we’re excited about include:

• The ability to assign multiple ads to one keyword (Yahoo calls keywords “targets” – because search marketing isn’t confusing enough). Google and MSN already do this, so it’ll be nice when this feature is live in Yahoo
• The ability to target by geographic region OR DMA – the DMA function is very cool and user friendly. It displays a map of the region you’re targeting and highlights the DMA regions as you select them
• A very interesting campaign forecasting feature which shows you (visually) how many clicks you can expect based on your maximum bid
• A campaign dashboard that’s very intuitive and somewhat customizable

The bottom line is that if you’ve used Google Adwords to any degree, Yahoo’s new search platform will not present many surprises. The good news for search marketers everywhere is that the ability to create ad groups in Yahoo will enable usto standardize our campaigns a lot more than we ever could before.

Mr. Kim assured all the nervous nellies on the call that campaign migration from the old platform to the new one should be painless.

Tag: Yahoo

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Google has a new concern – saving electricity. They’re not just trying to alter things within the sprawling Google complex, though. In a new white paper, the company “is calling on the computer industry to create a simpler and more efficient power supply standard.”

John Markoff of The New York Times described Google’s plan, which “calls for a shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12-volt standard. Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, the simpler design of the new power supply would make it easier to achieve higher overall efficiencies.”

Chris Calwell, the vice president and director for policy and research at Ecos Consulting, indicated that the industry has been working on the problem for some time. “We now have 70 compliant designs from 15 to 20 manufacturers,” he told Markoff.

The problem with current PC power supplies is “overprovisioning,” which Calwell compared to “putting a 400-horsepower engine in every car, just because some cars have to tow large trailers every once in a while,” Calwell said. As a car guy, I sort of resent that analogy – powerful cars are fun, and cars with 400 horsepower are rarely attached to trailers. In electrical terms, though, it’s a valid argument.

If you doubt Google’s commitment, look at Google co-founder Larry Page, who made an appearance at the Consumer Electronics show to push for conservation. “I’m going to just plead with all of you, let’s get the power supply problems fixed, or let’s get all these devices talking together,” he said.

By the way, Larry Page has provided financial backing for Tesla Motors – I think he understands the power issue as it relates to both cars and electricity.

Tag: Google

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

First, a quote “… implementing meta tags – more specifically the keyword meta tag – is not going to have any affect on your rankings.” – Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com said recently in LED discussion list.

Break Away from Keyword Meta Tags

Two list members then (who claim to be SEO’s) quoted Jill Whalen’s above comment suggesting they believe that keyword meta tags still have an effect on ranking. Can keyword meta tags possibly still matter? Title tags still matter – critically, description tags may, sometimes matter … a little, but keyword meta tags? Uh-uh.

It’s long past time to stop wasting energy on that tag and I hope those two SEO’s who both claimed they found meta tags useful will spend their energies elsewhere in the future. It’s old news that keyword tags are worthless.

I wrote an article in 1999 or 2000 titled “Keyword Meta Tags Search Phrase Tutorial” listing the top 8 ingredients to ranking well in the search engines.

I went back today to review it and found that remarkably few things have changed. So I massaged and edited a few things, added a small type disclaimer and linked to some online tools from that page, including a “Search engine simulator tool” and an “HTML source code viewer” and a also linked to a previous article I’d written in 2002 called “SEO Keyword Voodoo: Invisible Meta Tag Mumbo Jumbo” because, as you might guess from the title, I am 100% with Jill Whalen on the futility of mucking around with keyword meta tags.

Keyword Meta tags went south in about 1998-99 or so when webmasters began keyword stuffing and the search engines stopped paying attention to them. They are not used, nor are they trusted at all by any search engines. If they are not purposely abused, they are completely misunderstood by webmasters still. Don’t waste your time fussing with them or tweaking them. They’re an old and badly abused element of HTML code that no longer does a thing for ranking.

To further prove my point, I’ve created a Rollyo search tool, available from a link in my resource box below, which allows you to search only the top 25 SEO bloggers and the Official Search Engine Blogs for the search phrase “keyword meta tags.”

At the time of this writing, only 9 results came back on that search. Nine. Keyword meta tags are no longer being discussed by anyone, let alone being used in SEO. After visiting each of the nine search results from that searchroll, I discovered that most of those results are either derisive comments about “keyword meta tags” from the SEO blogger or are derisive comments left by visitors about the folly of meta tag massaging!

My favorite blog post from among the results of that SearchRoll are from Aaron Wall of SEObook when he said,

“… an old client wants me to rewrite their meta tags. A total waste of time, but if it makes them happy, oh well … Meta tags? … hehehe”

Convinced yet that keyword meta tags are pointless? SEO bloggers say … Ding! hehehe!

Tag: keyword meta tags

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Have a bookmark! –