Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

On the way into the office this morning I heard an ad for Yahoo. It wasn't the normal advertisement, it was simply one of those promo spots where the traffic guy mentions the sponsor of the traffic. He said something like, "Find what you're searching for with Yahoo. Visit Yahoo.com."

I assume they've got similar spots running all over the country. It's interesting to watch the giants of search duke it out in offline media. This is a search war, and MSN has upped the ante. Although, I've yet to see or hear an ad for Google. I guess they don't need to advertise when they're getting so much free publicity anyway.

I have seen some print ads for Google Adwords, but that doesn't count since it's more of a B2B ad and not trying to get more consumers to use their search engine.

It's been a long time since Looksmart did anything that anyone cared about, but there's some news about their new Vertical Consumer Search Sites over on Clickz.

You may have already seen the Google logo of the day:

It's Vincent Van Gogh's birthday, so they came up with a very cool logo in tribute to the artist. One of my favorites so far.

I remember several years back when Go.com and Goto.com got into a little tiff over trademark infringement. I think it was over having a similar logo or something. Anyway, they worked it out and Go.com started displaying Goto listings. At some later date--probably the second their settlement expired--Go.com switched to Google. I'm not sure when it was. I hadn't even visited go.com for about 4 years until today. (Infoseek used to be my favorite before Disney took over and screwed it up!). The reason for my visit today is that Overture announced that Go.com will be switching back to Overture. This will also include Disney Online and other reated sites making the switch to Overture, or Yahoo or whatever they're calling themselves today.

I'm not sure what kind of traffic Go.com gets these days, but it's nice to see Overture winning some business back from Google for a change. I love Adwords, but I think it's good for the paid search industry to have more than one main player. More than 2 would even be better, so we'll see what happens with MSN.

I noticed that Paul Allen posted some comments about the Urchin purchase by Google. It's hard to know what Google plans to do with it, but obviously they see some real value and will certainly cause a stir with it--regardless of how it's used.

Bob Parsons over at GoDaddy.com wrote an article about how a federal agency recently decided to make .us domain whois data public, basically disallowing private registrations. Obviously this change could cut into GoDaddy's profit margins because they charge for those private registrations, but Bob makes some good points in that article about the value of allowing private registrations.

I personally don't use private registrations, but I see the value under certain circumstances. I don't think they should get rid of private registrations, but if they do, we'll just see even more fake whois info than we're already seeing. The problem with this whole issue is that you've got a government agency that doesn't have a clue, yet they're making policy decisions that will actually make the whois data less accurate than it currently is. Pretty typical for a government agency, but it's quite annoying if you ask me. If you don't agree with their decision, you can sign the petition. If enough people speak up, they might come to their senses.

Google's buying Urchin Software for an undisclosed sum. It's a very interesting move, but it kind of makes sense that they would want some good tracking software to add to their arsenal.

I don't have much experience with Urchin's products, but I saw it in a demo last November at Wembaster World PubCon. It looked like a pretty robust system. It's good enough for Google, or maybe the price was right and they figure they can improve it to Google standards. Either way, it will be interesting to see how/if they integrate this into their adwords tracking like Yahoo's done with their Marketing Console--that allows users to track non-Yahoo/Overture ads along with their own.

Hopefully they'll decrease the price like to make it more accessible they did with Keyhole. There are a lot of good tracking programs out there today, but they all cost a pretty penny. There is a huge gap between the free/low-cost tracking services and the "enterprise solutions" offered by companies like Omniture, WebTrends, and Urchin. If they do, it will by by invitation only, and will remain in beta for 4 years.

Kris Shaffer is Goolgle-eyed in his predictions about a future Google operating system, but he makes a very convincing case for just such a proposition.

Yeah, it's sad, but true, paid search rates are going up - too bad. But it's still a very cost-effective marketing tactic, if you do it right.

One of the fools over at Fool.com offers up some commentary on what he calls "Google's Potentially Fatal Flaw".

It's an interesting assessment, but I think the major flaw lies in the logic of Rick's article, not Google. Granted, I agree that click fraud will continue to be an issue, and hopefully a more visible one in the future, but as far as his comments about Google increasing their search inventory to the point where all the big advertisers run out of bmoney--leaving just the nickel bids--is ridiculous. There is a lot more demand for most keywords right now than their is supply. The amount of demand for paid keyword traffic grows every day as potential advertisers are bombarded with media hype about how great search is. You know, I sometimes wish someone wouldn't have spilled the beans. It was a lot easier and more fun before everyone knew how effective search marketing is. As far as advertisers bidding smarter, that could happen, but when they do, there will be someone else there to take their top spot and pay just as much for the click. Besides, I think Rick underestimates how smart search marketers are currently.

My personal opinion is that Google won't lose because they get too much inventory or because of "smarter" advertisers. If Google does lose (which seems unlikely at this time), it will be because one of their competitors came in for the kill--not because of any of the industry-related factors mentioned in that Motley Fool article.

Lawrence Deon gives his opinion on what he calls Google's Aging Delay - essentially what others call the "sandbox effect". Lawrence says it's a 6-8 month delay. I'm convinced there is a delay in new links kicking in to boost the ranking of a site in the search results, but I believe it ranges from a couple months to as many as 6-8 like Lawrence suggests.

Kind of interesting article on businessweek.com

My favorite quote:
"Ironically, in the short term, the flood of competitors is good news for Google and Yahoo, which get revenues from serving ads to other sites -- including rival search engines. These new sites will simply increase the ad networks' reach.

Longer term, though, it could be a different story. Just as the large TV networks have lost viewers and advertisers to hundreds of cable competitors, the big search sites could face daunting competition from all the little guys with innovative business models. Search engine Snap.com, for example, can charge advertisers only for ads leading to actual purchases, rather than the traditional method of paying for ad 'click-throughs.' "

Yeah, I think Google and Yahoo are shaking in their boots worrying about Snap. I guess it's irrelevant that Snap only does CPA deals because they have to or they wouldn't get any advertisers. Oh, yeah, and there's the itty bitty minor detail that nobody uses Snap and probably never will. At least they're honest about it. (As a sidenote, Yahoo and other search engines have been known to do CPA deals with advertisers, so it's not all that innovative).

I do think that there is some room for some niche players to do very well in search, I'm just not convinced that Snap has a niche, or that they're one that will be successful--at least not in its current incarnation.

In an ironic twist of fate, Google has sent cease and desist letters to the operators of a few Google X clones who popped up after they take down the "real" Google X--presumably for tradmark infringement complaints by Apple (or potential complaints).

From Google Blogoscoped

Melissa Burgess wrote an aticle on MediaPost today about bidding on trademarked terms...

"The same age-old question comes up in every search strategy meeting: 'Do you think that we should purchase our brand name in Google and Overture?' The answer out of one corner is a resounding, 'YES, YES, YES!' However, there are those few who think that it's not necessary if you're already coming up at the top of the page in the organic search results. Let's take a quick look at a few reasons why it is still important to have control over your brand name..."

Full Article

MediaPost reports on a survey done by the Kelsey Group and ConStat that shows a huge increase in usage of the 'Net by consumers searching for local merchants. The survey also showed a decline in the percentage of people who turn to newspapers for that information.

There's been a lot of hype about local search lately, and I think this study shows that it may not be here quite yet, but the hey day of local search will surely come in the very near future.

I don't know anyone who actually uses BlowSearch, but according to Andy Beal, they're getting ready to launch a new PPC product with some cool features that I'd like to see from some of the major PPC search engines, including:

* Competitor Blocking tool — competitors can be deterred from maliciously clicking on paid results as advertisers can enter a competitor’s IP address to automatically prevent paid listings from being displayed to that specific IP address.

* ROI tracking technology — lets advertisers follow how network partners perform in order to tailor and customize their search advertising campaign.

* Traffic Source Selection technology — lets users control their listings on a site-by-site basis across the BlowSearch network.

From Search Engine Lowdown

"InterActiveCorp announced Monday that it has agreed to a $1.85 billion buyout of Ask Jeeves, a search engine that has long been overshadowed by Google and Yahoo."

Read more on ZDNet

Kevin Lee gives a little bit more insight into MSN's new AdCenter. (article from Clickz)

Comscore released their Feburary rankings yesterday. Here's an excert from the press release:

comScore Media Metrix today released its monthly analysis of consumer activity at top online properties and categories. In February, the Internet proved to be an important resource for those reaching out to others on Valentine’s Day and reaching for their checkbooks in preparation for Tax Day. Millions of Americans also turned to the Web for activities related to the Super Bowl and other sporting events.

“Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl are two more entries on a growing list of events that channel people’s passions and interests onto the Internet,” said Peter Daboll, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix. “The acceptability of sending sentimental greetings online and the popularity of the Web leading up to and even during TV sports broadcasts are yet further reminders that the line between the online and offline worlds is increasingly blurred.”

I remember when Comet Cursors first came out back in 1999 or 2000. I thought it was the coolest thing. Then it got more than a little annoying as sites started having these huge, ugly cursors that took up half the screen.

Apparently, the funky cursors are making a comeback. This time they're not just a silly gimmick--they're real, live advertisments. Check out nba.com/lakers to see a McDonalds logo that changes to a lakers logo when you mouse over a link. (Note: this is an IE-only trick. I tried it with Firefox and it doesn't work).

It's still kind of annoying, but at least I know it's an ad for Mickey-D's and not just annoying for the sake of being annoying.

I wonder if this trend will start to take off with other sites. It's interesting because I read an article the other day about how online advertising trends cycle back into vogue about every 6 years, but usually with a new twist. It's been about 6 years since Comet cursors came onto the scene, so it's about time for the return of the funky cursors--this time as an advertising platform.

I never thought bellbottoms would come back either, but I guess you can't fight the fashion cycle or the online advertising cycle.

Article about Cursor Ads from Investors.com

Info link about Yahoo's new 360 service

I don't think it will have any effect on potential US trademark lawsuits, but the BBC reports that Google lost a court ruling about trademark infringement. Apparently a lawsuit was filed by a company whose competitors were allowed to bid on their trademarked name. This could eventually lead to a yet another change in Google's trademark policy. Maybe they'll decide not to allow competitors to bid on trademarked terms. If they don't make that change, they're going to get a lot more lawsuits from companies in other countries, and probably here in the US, too. They've got to make the financial decision if it's worth it to continue to allow bidding on competitors' trademarks and just pay the legal fees and fines as they arise. I'm sure they're making a lot of money from bids on trademarked terms, so at this point, it probably makes better business sense to keep the status quo. A flood of lawsuits could change their mind. Or maybe one day Larry and Sergi will wake up and decide that allowing companies to bid on trademarks they don't own is evil and they'll change their policy.

The title of the Wired article, " Search Rank Easy to Manipulate" is a little misleading, but it's always interesting to get a non-search marketing geek perspective on search engine optimization. This Wired article is an interview with Greg Boser, who I heard speak at the Webmaster World Conference in Vegas last fall. I remember meeting him back in 2000 at SES in Dallas. He's been at this a long time and knows what he's doing. He seems to enjoy being considered one of the well-known spammers in the industry. I don't think he's as bad as he makes himself out to be, but he likes playing wearing the "black hat" and doesn't seem to care about being the bad guy as long as he's getting traffic and making money.

From Wired Article

I don't know how long this has been in effect, but today I noticed that Google lets you add or update your business information. They mail you a confirmatoin PIN so they know it's really you and that it's a correct address.

I noticed because I'm getting ready to move to a new office in American Fork, so I checked to see what listings show up for "internet marketing" in AF and surrounding area. Then I clicked on the link at the bottom of the page that says "Information for Business Owners"

That takes you to a login page where you can use your google login and they'll let you submit your business (or sign up for a google account if you don't have one). Then you put in your business information including: address, phone, fax, 200 char. description, and you choose the categories your business falls into (max. 5). Then they say they'll mail you the confirmation PIN to verify your address before your listing goes live. Pretty cool. Google's getting serious about this local thing, eh?

Google's starting to nudge open the floodgates for Gmail by offering random Google users a chance to sign up for an account from a link on the Google homepage. From PCWorld.com

MediaPost reports on MSN's entry into paid search- quoting an MSN spokesperson who says they will start off with a pilot program in France and Singapore.

Everyone "in the know" keeps talking about how MSN's search product will offer more targeting options and basically be better than Adwords--at least for advertisers. I'm curious to get a peek inside to see what all the excitement is about.

I've never really been a Mac guy. I used Macs a lot back in college, but it's been a while since I've even used one. So, I don't know much about OS X, but Google's got a new version of their homepage on Google Labs called Google X that apparently uses a similar interface. It's pretty much the same thing we've come to know and love from Google with some cool little mouseover effects and links to all the cool Google search features.

We all knew it was only a matter of when, not if MS would come out with their own paid listings. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is abou to unveil the new system. According to the article, it won't be ready for prime time for at least 6 months to a year, probably due at least partly to the fact that they have a contract with Yahoo to use the search results formerly known as Overture through June 2006. More details to come today.

Stay tuned.

Google finally decided to offer customization of their news page. It's about time. It still isn't as flexible as MyYahoo, but it's a step in the right direction.

This article on webpronews offers some tips on using the new features.

This article from USATODAY.com talks about AdSense and profiles a few of the thousands of Adsense users who are making money with Gooooooogle's cute little ads.

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."

Lois McMaster Bujold, 'A Civil Campaign', 1999"

I was wondering when the big name media dudes were going to pick up on the Google cloaking fiasco. Finally saw a piece on eweek.com. I realize it's not a big deal, but this is Google we're talking about and I still think it's pretty ironic that they come right out and say "don't cloak" and "don't be evil", but then their people utilize cloaking techniques. I realize it was an accident and apparently wasn't supposed to be spidered and exposed in the main search results, but it's still dang funny, you have to admit. Why else would I keep talking about it 3 days later?

I still think Google's autolink feature is a completely different beast than Microsoft's infamous smart tags. I also think Google is not going to take advantage of their position as market leader like MS would, but I'm starting to bend towards the side of the argument against autolink. I think the central problem is that Autolink opens the door for more intrusive additions to publishers' content such as adwords or other types of advertising-based links that steal traffic from innocent site owners. It might not even be Google who crosses that line with the next "autolink-clone". It will be another company who saw that Google got away with autolink, so why not take it one step further. You can't tell me everyone's not trying to copy Google's every move anyway--except for retail sites, who copy Amazon's every move.

Walt Mossberg came out against autolink in today's Wall Street Journal. In fact, he says he spoke with Google people who say they're considering changing the way the new feauture works. Here's a quote from Walt's article:

"I've had long conversations about this with senior Google officials, and they say they are actively considering changing the way the AutoLink feature works so it might not actually alter the Web pages themselves. They note that the feature is a work in progress. But the Google officials also insist their first principle is user convenience."

First off, of course it's a work in progress. Everything that company creates is a work in progress. That explains the 12 year beta tests.

Read more from The Wall Street Journal

My prediction is that Google will make the necessary changes to appease the weepers and wailers on this issue. They're just trying to create a more convenient way to browse the web. They have historically been very good at listening to their customers and making necessary adjustments. Also they take their motto (sometimes too) seriously -- "don't be evil". Even if "evil" is a very subjective concept. Typically anything computer geeks don't like is considered evil, even if there's nothing inherently evil about it. Take pop-up ads for example. The guys at Google don't like popups so they've taken a hard-line stance against popup ads. Not only do they not run popup ads on their own site, you can't even run any ads in Adwords that link to a page with a popup ad. That's the beauty of living and doing business in America. They are free to run their company however they want. Computer geeks get to create a company that does things other computer geeks like. These geeks just happend to come up with something that a lot of non-geeks like, too!

You can tell we're hard up for search engine news when you read Danny Sullivan's blog post about the "Miserable Failure" partial indexing on Google. I see "link only" listings that show up at the top of search results like that all the time. Although I don't have an answer to why they do it, I don't understand why it's even worth mentioning. Of course, here I am writing about it. Doh! Dumb blogger!

With all the Google Fever going around the media lately, I'm somewhat surprised the "mainstream" press hasn't done any stories about the Google cloaking fiasco. Maybe it's one of those things that only search engine geeks like us would understand, or maybe it's just too far under the radar, but it did show up on slashdot yesterday. Although, most of the Slashdot nerds didn't think it was a big deal.

Anyway, there's an interesting thread about it on webmasterworld in which GoogleGuy explains the situation as follows:

Those pages were primarily intended for the Google Search Appliances that do site search on individual help center pages. For example, http://adwords.google.com/support has a search box, and that search is powered by a Google Search Appliance. In order to help the Google Search Appliance find answers to questions, the user support system checked for the user agent of "Googlebot" (the Google Search Appliance uses "Googlebot" as a user agent), and if it found it, it added additional information from the user support database into the title.

The issue is that in addition to being accessed via the internal site-search at each help center, these pages can be accessed by static links via the web. When the web-crawl Googlebot visits, the user support system thinks that it's the Google Search Appliance (the code only checks for "Googlebot") and adds these additional keywords.

That's the background, so let me talk about what we're doing. To be consistent with our guidelines, we're removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are already gone from most of our data centers--a search like [site:google.com/support] didn't return any of these pages when I checked. Once the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject "Reinclusion request" to explain the situation).

So basically, Google gave their own pages the boot for not following their own guidelines. It sounds like a harmless mistake, but I still think it's hilarious. At least they fessed up to it and made the best of the situation by kicking their own pages out of the index. Although, I have a feeling they'll have a pretty easy time getting those (non-cloaked) pages back in the index.

If anyone missed this, I've got screenshots of the cloaked page and the SERPS page. Not much to see, but you can see the title stuffed with "useful" keywords.

I don't know if it's a conspiracy, but there's some lively discussion going on over at Slashdot about the Google cloaking issue brought to light by threadwatch the other day. Everyone on Slashdot loves to make a comment, and 90% of them have no idea what they're talking about--but it makes for some entertaining reading anyway.

I just saw this thread over at threadwatch.org about Google's apparent cloaking job, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. Sure enough, they're serving up a different page for "regular" browsers--IE, Mozilla, etc--than they're serving to GoogleBot. And they're basing the page to serve on just user agent, so you can see the so-called cloaked page if you change your user agent to googlebot.

I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this one. Google has some serious explaining to do on this one.

InformationWeek >Mark Jen lands a job at Plaxo - congrats dude. You deserve another chance. Plaxo seems to be fine with him blogging about them (or they wouldn't have hired him, right?).

Google decided to take Desktop search live after only 5 short months of beta testing. Sure, 5 months is a long time for most companies to leave a product in beta, but this is Google we're talking about. Yeah, the ones who love to leave products in eterna beta, for many months and even years sometimes.

This MediaPost article gives a little more insight into last year's ruling regarding the Geico-Google trademark lawsuit. It's only a matter of time before more of the same type of lawsuits surface, especially since competitors are now allowed to bid on trademarked terms--they just can't include the trademark in the ad text.

"At the EclipseCon 2005 conference here, a leading Google Inc. engineer gave a rare glimpse into the workings of the search powerhouse.

In a keynote Wednesday titled "A Look Behind the Scenes at Google," Urs Hoelzle, vice president of engineering, essentially described the company's secret sauce as "the return of batch computing." Large numbers of cheap hardware, plus networking and intelligent software to support fault tolerance and other key functions, have gone a long way with the Mountain View, Calif., company, he said."

eWeek Article

You know what the problem with the "Open Directory" is? They're not open. At least not the way it's supposed to be. I have heard from a lot of people who have applied to edit various categories and been rejected without any information as to why. Meanwhile the category is basically free of any sites and continues that way with no editor or an editor a couple levels higher who ignores all relevant directory submissions.

A lot of other sites uses Dmoz's directory because unfortunately there's nothing better, and some categories are ok, but if you dig down into the regional categories, the sites are pretty sparse and no where close to a representation of what's truly available.

I think there is a real opportunity for a good directory to come into this market and be what Yahoo used to be and what Dmoz was supposed to be (remember Newhoo?). Search engines are great, but there are times when I want a good, relevant directory, and sure Yahoo has a directory, but it's not all that good anymore, and definitely not fresh as most site owners prefer not to part with the $299/year listing fee. It's too bad nobody really cares about making Dmoz into anything worthwhile, because they're really missing an opportunity there.

"People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work
standing up."

- Ogden Nash

"For small search marketers, click fraud can pose major problems by decreasing conversion rates and ratcheting up ad costs. But, while the challenge is well-known, finding a solution isn't so easy--and, in some instances, might actually be hampered by search engines themselves, said industry experts at a panel discussion Wednesday at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York."

MediaPost Reports from SES NY

"BLOGS--ONCE CONSIDERED THE DOMAIN OF all that is not corporate--will soon be an indispensable marketing tool, agreed a mix of public relations, marketing, and research professionals who gathered this week at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York. The blogosphere is increasingly portrayed as neutral ground where businesses can tackle issues head on in a sort of preemptive damage control, and attract consumers to their products and services with compelling content. Experts and professionals at Search Engine Strategies discussed how to find the right voice, get it out, and achieve the greatest reach possible."

MediaPost Article

Celebrate Yahoo's birthday with a free ice cream cone! Yahoo just turned 10 and they're treating the whole world to a Baskin Robbins ice cream (today only).

I just noticed the press release about the Enquiro search engine eye tracking study. More interesting data in the release, including numbers on the percentage of users who saw the listings in each position on the search results page.

Andy Beal reports on the search behavior session at the Search Engine Strategies conference. Very interesting stuff. Especially interesting to me is the eye tracking data that shows that users' eyes follow a "golden triangle of search" when reviewing search results pages. The clickthrough data is also very interesting stuff.

Read more about it

Clickz reports on the story saying that Yahoo will bring the PPC services currently offered under the Overture brand under the Yahoo brand name. It's mostly a matter of semantics, but will this cause MSN to move away from using Yahoo's results now that they're clearly part of the Yahoo brand? Maybe not, at least not in the short term, but everyone had to see this coming from the day Overture was acquired.