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Yahoo's Hot How-To's

What does everyone on the web want to know how to do? According to Yahoo tying a tie is number one. I've got the necktie thing down but I'm more interested in number 6 (how to kiss), #9 (how to make money), and of course, #16 (how to levitate).

Google answers questions about links to bad neighborhoods

Hot off the blog from Inside Google Sitemap (via SEW)...

Straight from the horse's mouth, they admit that links from bad neighborhood won't hurt your site, but links to bad neighborhoods will. This has been speculated for a long time because you really can't control who links to you, but you can control where you link to. Here's the quote:

"In general, linking to web spammers and 'bad neighborhoods' can harm your site's indexing and ranking. And while links from these sites won't harm your site, they won't help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site."

Utah Bloggers Blog - it's alive!

The Utah Bloggers site has been updated and is showing signs of life. Looks like they've secured some big names in Utah blogging for the panel--including Phil Windley and Tim Stay. They're also trying to round up several sponsors to give away cool door prizes. It's shaping up to be a very cool event. I'll be there!

Google Accounts for Half of all US Searches in April

From Adotas Google is still kicking the other guys' butts in terms of total search marketshare. Incredible. Their lead doesn't seem to be slowing at all. Very impressive.

Google Adds Video Ad Option to Adwords

Somehow I missed this announcement a few days ago...I've been busy and kind of out of it in terms of news lately, but Google just announced video ads as an option for adwords in addition to text and graphic ads. The way it works is the user will see a static image and can choose to click "play" if they want to see the video. It's a cool concept that I've seen implemented on other sites, but with Google's adsense network, they could potentially get some huge market penetration and let you target your video ads to some specific niches that weren't previously available. Very cool!

Yahoo & eBay Team Up

Yeah, this could be big. This deal blurs the line between two of the biggest Internet companies in terms of traffic and brand name recognition. Yeah, that sounds like a big deal to me.

Video Interview with Larry Page on Channel4

Here's the video interview of Larry Page. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but according to SEW, he discusses artificial intelligence's role in the future of search and answers questions about China and privacy concerns.

Utah Bloggers Conference

Ryan Money mentioned a Utah Bloggers Conference. It's June 13th from 6:30-9:00 PM up at the Larry H. Miller Innovation Center in Sandy. Anyone who lives nearby and blogs, or wants to blog, come check it out. I guess anyone can come. I don't really like evening events like that since it cuts into my family time, but I'll try to make it.

Ryan says you can get updates on Utahbloggers.com but there's not much on that site right now. Stay tuned?

Mazda Google Earth Treasure Hunt

I guess you're not cool unless you're doing some kind of advertising promotion in conjuction with Google. I just saw the latest as a flipped through my latest issue of Wired and saw an insert with a big picture of the earth and it says "Is your Mazda CX-7 hiding here?" then you open it up and it says, "or here?" and folds out to explain the sweepstakes. It's essentially a treasure hunt using Google Earth. It directs you to neversawitcoming.com for the video clues to get started on the hunt. I haven't even checked out the clues, but I thought the concept was very cool. I've thought about doing something similar as a promotional gimmick to drive traffic to one of my sites, but never really pursued it. I have a feeling this isn't the last Google promotion we'll see this year...

By the way, I just realized this is old news but it's the first I've heard of it.

MSN Offers Opt Out of Open Directory Listings

This is sweet! -- finally a way to get the search engines (well, actually just MSN for now) to not use your directory listing in the normal search results. You put this little meta tag into your homepage and it will not list your site with your Dmoz title and description.

Will the other search engines join in? Well, Yahoo doesn't use Dmoz snippets anyway, but they should do the same with their directory listings. Google uses Dmoz, but seems to only use the Dmoz snippets some of the time anyway, so they may or may not join the party on this one. This is a great idea...way to go MSN!

Link Calculator from Text Link Ads

Text Link Ads has a new Link Worth Calculator that gives an estimate of the value of a link if you were to buy (or sell) a link on a certain site. I'm not sure how they calculate the value, but it's a pretty slick tool. Try checking the value for Google.com or Yahoo.com. If you think that's good, check the value of a link on www.text-link-ads.com. Yeah, I wasn't going to even mention this until I saw that.

I've seen blog posts/links to this thing all over the place. Another classic example of prime link bait. Nice work TLA!

More info on the TLA blog

New SEO Directory

I recently came across a new SEO directory that looks a lot better than most I've seen. The directory is SEOdex. It's owned by the same guys who run Search Engine Journal. It's brand spankin' new, so don't expect a ton of traffic from it right away, but it's cheap to submit and it will become a valuable source of traffic over time. Even though it's new, it's backed by guys who know their stuff, so it won't take long before the traffic is rolling in. It's a nice looking site--clean design and logical categorization structure. I think the challenge with this type of directory will come as they get more and more sites submitting to each category. They'll probably have to break out the categories by location or alphabetically like Dmoz. I'd like it if they broke them out both ways to give users the option of how to browse.

Anyway, check out the SEODex Directory and see for yourself.

Google Notebook Goes Live

It's actually been live for a few days now, but I don't think I mentioned it here, so if you missed it, Google Notebook is now live. Google Notebook is a cool little application that lets you keep an online journal or notebook with personal notes about websites, etc. It's just a little window that pops up, so you never have to leave the webpage to make notes about it. Pretty cool, eh? try it out

Matt Cutts gives the dirt on bigdaddy

Matt Cutts posted a long post about the BigDaddy update and other associated topics.

Dilbert Search Engine Comic

I don't know why, but I've never been a huge Dilbert fan, however, Dilbert comic strip about search is pretty dang funny. (from yesterday)

And they followed that up with today's comic strip about Larry and Sergy's death ray.

I can't wait to see what he comes up with tomorrow! (hopefully that link will work).

Adwords: Spring Cleaning

Saw a good Adwords tip over on the Inside Adwords blog. They suggest cleaning up your adwords account. They offer the suggestion to organize your ads and label your ad groups. I've worked with a lot of different clients' adwords accounts and my own and I know those adgroups and ads can become quite a mess if you're not organized in how you set htem up and label them. It's a good idea to go through and review what you've got going and make sure it's all organized. It will help you keep track of where you're spending your money, but it can also improve the performance of your ads by keeping related keywords together in the same adgroups.

Another idea as you're doing this is to make sure you have added all the appropriate negative match keywords to each adgroup. A good way to monitor this is to check your log files/analytics reports for any wacky keyword strings that are coming from adwords. You might as well add those as negative matches so you don't have to pay for junky traffic.

The 5 minute Link Value Test

» The 5 minute Link Value Test - (from Stuntdubl) offers some good ideas on quick valuation tactics for links.

Google Co-op

Barry over at SERountable.com explains what Google Co-Op is and he even set up a co-op to try it out. It's something totally different from Google, but it seems like it might have the potential to improve search relevance. I haven't had time to really wrap my head around it yet, but it's definitely something worth investigating.

New Google Adwords Traffic Estimator

It's always been a pain to have to log into your Adwords account and nagigate to the cost/traffic estimator to figure out what a keyword is going to cost. Google finally released a public Google AdWords Traffic Estimator tool that you can access without having to be logged into your account. I'd still really like to see a tool more like Yahoo's keyword tool that shows the total number of searches for the specified keyword. I doubt we'll ever see that, though. I think Google likes people to think they get more searches than they acutally do (even though the real numbers are pretty impressive, I'm sure).

20-25% of all Google Searches are Unique

I can't find the post, but I thought I blogged about something I read recently that said half of all Google searches were unique--that is, that half of all keyword searches are searched on for the first time. In listening to the parts of the webcast recording from Google that I missed yesterday, one of the chief search engineers from Google said that 20-25% of all searches are unique or searched on for the first time. That number seems more realistic to me, but it's still impressive. That's a huge chunk of searches if nearly 1 out of every 4 searches is being searched on for the first time. So I guess if no one is searching on your keywords yet, just wait a few days and maybe someone will search for you tomorrow.

Google Trends - what are people searching for?

I was in and out and missed a lot of the Google press day webcast, but I caught a few interesting tidbits. I somehow missed when they talked about Google Trends, but a friend referred me to it (thanks, Peter). Anyway, Google Trends is basically a tool that gives you a peek into search popularity of whatever term you type in. It shows peaks and valleys in search volume as well as cities, regions and languages where that particular word or phrase is popular to search on. It also flags historical news items that might be tied in with spikes in search popularity. So far it looks like a pretty cool keyword search trend research tool. On the main page for Google Trends they give the examples of comparing Skiing and Surfing and major holidays. Here's mine for "Google, Yahoo, and MSN":

Also, as usual, Google had several other new projects up it's sleeve that were announced at the press day. (You can watch the recorded version if you missed it this morning).

Google Press Day 2006

Google Press Day is going on right now. I'm listening to the webcast right now. I'll report on anything interesting I hear. Right now a Google employee is talking about how Google has grown and now has local offices all over the world. Just handed off to a lady that says they're trying to scale their operations by opening a lot of new offices at the same time, rather than scaling sequentially over time. She says that local partnerships are very important to their international growth. For example, she says that they started their reseller channel in China before they even offered their products directly in that country. (I didn't know that). Apparently the strategy worked. She said that Google Maps launched in Asian countries before any other countries (after US/North America, that is). She also highlighted a few of their products that have originated in other countries--for example Google Maps in Australia, Google Finance in Bangalore.

Yahoo Gives More Details About Ad System Upgrade

Hmmm...somehow I never noticed before now that they had a codename for the update that Yahoo's making to their ad system. I guess they're calling it the "Panama upgrade". Hey, who says Google's the only one that gets a dorky codename for any change in their algorithm or advertising system? Anyway, SEW has more details on the changes to YSM's ad system. Looks like Yahoo is finally coming around and adding some of the features they should have had ages ago like Geo-targeting and multiple ad testing. Supposedly the control panel is more intuitive, too, which would be a welcome change.

In-house Search Marketers Wear a Lot of Hats

Yeah, I believe it. Even us search marketing specialists have to wear a lot of hats these days.

How to Contact Google

It's not always easy to get your voice heard by the search giant, but there are several different ways to contact Google - Google Blogoscoped has put together a list with links to make it easy to get in touch with the right department or person at Google.

New Yahoo! PPC System

I got an email from Yahoo about the new and improved ad systems for Yahoo Search Marketing. They realize they need to step things up after getting the boot from MSN.

Here are some snippets from their email message:

Easy-to-Use Control Panel
A completely redesigned, easy-to-navigate control panel will help you see what's working and what's not--at the level of detail you choose--so you can take action and get even better results.

Fast Ad Activation
Most new ads will go online within minutes, allowing you to connect with customers quickly, and easily make changes to your ads whenever you need to.

Ad Testing
Easily test multiple versions of an ad to find the message that works best for your customers and provides the greatest return on your advertising investment. You can then choose to shift impressions to the ad that performs best.

Geo-Targeting
Display your ads broadly or narrow your geographic distribution to better target your customers, customize your ads and control your costs.

Campaign Budgeting, Forecasting and Scheduling
Create, budget and schedule individual advertising campaigns for greater control over your advertising strategy and spending. Review forecasts of your potential clicks based on your bids and budget and see how many clicks you're leaving to your competitors.

Visibility
Understand how well your ads are performing relative to your competitors with the new Quality Index displayed for each ad. You'll also see the bid range necessary for premium placement at the top of the search results page.

Easy-to-Use Control Panel
A completely redesigned, easy-to-navigate control panel will help you see what's working and what's not--at the level of detail you choose--so you can take action and get even better results.

Two Great Posts on Link Building

Two great posts on link building from Jim Boykins, via SEOMoz.

Adwords to show fewer ads on some keyword searches

According to the Adwords blog, Google will be showing fewer ads for non-commercial queries as part of their quest to improve ad quality and relevance. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I find it interesting timing for the change and announcement, since I just noticed someone the other day who was saying that Google already shows fewer ads than Yahoo. I guess they like it that way.

Google Crawling Javascript Links

Apparently google is now crawling URLs within javascript. I still woudn't recommend a full-javascript navigation at this point. Stick with regular href links to be on the safe side.

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