Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

No, this blog isn't dead. Not yet anyway. I've just been busy. Anyway, I just got an email from Performics that I thought was interesting. I didn't think it was really worth posting on my main SEO blog but might be worth a quick mention here on Search Trends. I found it interesting because back when Google announced that they were going to buy Doubleclick/Performics, there was a huge outcry in the search marketing community because Google was going to own an SEO company. I can see the conflict of interest, but I figured since the search marketing division was such a small part of what Performics offered (and even smaller when you look at the entire DoubleClick offering), I figured they would sell it off to avoid being accused of being evil (heaven forbid).

Sure enough, that's exactly what's going to happen, according to the lastest email from Performics:

As you are aware, Google closed its acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, 2008. Since that time, we have been actively involved in integration planning for each of our products and business units. We have recently completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics business.

As a result of our planning, we are formally splitting DoubleClick Performics into two separately-run business units - Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing. We plan to integrate the Affiliate Marketing business into existing Google operations, providing enhanced value and reach for our Affiliate advertisers and additional tools and monetization opportunities for our publishers. We plan to sell the Search Marketing business unit to a third party. In Europe, these plans and their implications for our employees are subject to consultation with staff and employee representatives, where applicable.

During this transition, we will ensure that customers receive the same high level of service that they have always experienced. For those of you who have DoubleClick Performics relationships that include both Search and Affiliate Marketing services, we will assign separate account teams for each service. We will contact you shortly with more information regarding your assigned account team.

The Search Marketing business will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold. All client data will, of course, be kept confidential. Please contact your
Search account manager for additional information.

We plan to continue to aggressively invest in and grow our Search Marketing business during this period of transition, and we look forward to continuing our relationship with each of our Search clients.

Thank you for your continued support of DoubleClick Performics.

So there you have it. Google won't be competing with us SEOs after all. At least not as an SEO/SEM firm themselves. Just like I suspected would happen.

Labels: doubleclick, google, performics

From the Google Blog: Google is launching Knol - which appears to be a Squidoo-like service with a little Wikipedia thrown in for good measure. Just another step towards total world domination for the big G.

Labels: google

I feel like Google and Yahoo results are pretty comparable in terms of relevancy/quality--and have been for a few years now. Sometimes I get better results in Google, sometimes Yahoo. Well, according to the Compete blog Yahoo has a lot higher "search fulfillment" (meaning they find what they're looking for, or a least click through more on searches) than the other search engines. Too bad for Yahoo only 20% of the Internet population realize Yahoo's better.

Matt Cutts made the comment that more people use Google to find info that doesn't require a click through--and Google is better at providing info in a snippet so you don't have to click. Matt can't really argue with Compete's data, it's more like he's just caught up on the terminology. He's basically saying that just because people don't click through, doesn't mean they didn't "fulfill" their search query. Google doesn't need to defend itself on this issue--the fact is they have 70% of the market, so who cares if they get a slightly lower "fulfillment" ratio, or whatever you want to call it, they're still the king of search.

Labels: google, search engine stats, yahoo

Google pretty much rules the Internet and they've been trying to expand beyond their digital realm for the past couple years. I haven't heard about a lot of success with their print, radio, and other offline ads, but I am very curious to see how they do in getting their advertisers to buy non-Internet ads through their advertising platform.

I just read this post on the Adwords blog about a new tool they created that allows advertisers to create print ads more easily.

Labels: google, google print ads

Adam Lasnik posted the official guidelines from Google on how/when to use Flash content on a website.

The basic premise is, always show the search engines the exact same thing as you're showing your users. So you might get in trouble if you're hiding a bunch of keyword-rich content in an invisible div and that text is completely different than what shows up in your flash content. Best practice is to use Flash sparingly and support it with good, solid, on-page (visible) content for the search engines to chew on.

Labels: flash, google

I have no idea who Privacy International is, but apparently they came out with a privacy ranking of several top websites a few days back. Basically, this "watchdog group" used a very subjective ranking methodology (if you can call it that) that ranks these companies on their privacy policies and practices. Google came out at the bottom of the list with the worst possible ranking (black on the color code). Matt Cutts is ticked because he feels like the report is completely off base. Danny Sullivan also gives a strong (and long) defense of Google on SearchEngineLand.com.

I agree with Matt, Danny, and the countless others who are challenging the validity of this report. They're not saying Google is perfect (far from it), but they make some very valid points that Google is not the worst when it comes to privacy.

Labels: google

Google recently introduced a cool new trend watching tool they call Hot Trends. It ties in with Google Trends, but it shows a list of hot search keywords by date (only goes back to May 15 of this year) and then you can click on the word or phrase to see the trend page for that particular search term. Since Google controls the lion's share of Internet searches, it's nice that they like to share at least some of it with us search engine junkies. It's mostly news and blog search stuff, but very interesting to see what are the hot topics of the day.

Labels: google, google trends, news, search trends

This interview with Adam Lasnik offers up some pretty good info. It's a long-ish interview, but if you don't have time to read it all, here's a short summary of my take on Adam's comments:

• * You're ok to have some paid links, Google realizes they'll never catch them all, as long as you've got a good mix of links, you're probably fine. (they still don't like them, but that doesn't mean they're going to get you booted out of Google).
  
• * Duplicate content penalties are very rare and we're probably all worrying way too much about this one, too. If you're a black-hatter stealing other people's content from all over the web, you might be in trouble, though.
  
• * Google indexes pages with crappy (non-validated) code just fine, and will continue to do so as long as universities and other fine institutions continue to publish great content within crappy code.
  
• * If your site is popping in and out of the search results regularly with every algorithm update, you might be living on the edge of Google's "quality guidelines". Good sites shouldn't see much fluctuation in the search results with each algorithm update.
  

Read the whole interview here

Labels: google

Apparently, being a search engine can have its benefits, not the least of which (according to Q1 results) is making a ton of money. $3.66 billion in Q1 2007--which is up 63% from last year. The market seems happy with it--GOOG is up 2.5% so far for the day.

Labels: google

Google has changed the name of their product search to Google Product Search instead of Froogle. Froogle was a clever name, but this ain't Larry and Sergy's tiny little upstart anymore. Google is a big brand now, so they've got to start acting like it. The move makes complete sense in terms of maintaining their brand integrity. Kind of like what I read on Seth's blog about brand DNA this morning.

Labels: branding, google, seth godin

Dang! I thought Google dominated the search market in the US. Check out these UK search engine numbers from Hitwise - Google's got a stranglehold on the market with nearly 80% of UK searches!

Here's a recent press release with US figures for comparison. According to these numbers, Google has 64% of all searches in the US (and growing).

Labels: google, hitwise

BusinessWeek gets Googley

Labels: google

I forgot to mention this in my last post about the dumb new Utah law against trademark keyword bidding, but I'm sure Senator Eastman didn't just wake up one morning and just decide to make this law. As is usually the case, it came from some kind of special interest group and/or lobbyist who has some kind of ulterior motive. From what I've been reading, Matthew Prince, CEO of Utah-based Unspam has something to do with it, although I haven't seen any clear indication of what his interest would be in pushing this law through. Matthew even did some guest posts on the Utah senate blog. The guy loses me when he starts arguing that Utah's laws need to be more like international laws instead of sticking with the nationwide trademark laws that we have in place. Also, the Pontiac story is a lame example, because no one in their right mind was confused by seeing a Mazda ad when searching on Pontiac. It's not like Mazda was pretending to be Pontiac. That's insane! Pontiac was stupid for doing that campaign like that anyway, why didn't they just direct consumers to Pontiac.com? I'm sure it was some kind of co-op deal with Google, but still, they brought it upon themselves by directing users to Google.

(note: I actually think this was one of the best moves Pontiac ever made in terms of their online marketing--I mean we're still talking about it and linking to them after all this time, now that's what I call a good ROI)

Labels: google, laws, pontiac, ppc, trademark

I really don't get the logic behind the whole Belgium press lawsuit against Google. Even more than that, I don't get how Google lost the case (from the Google blog) I mean, seriously people, do you not understand the value that Google is providing for you in terms of traffic and exposure? Google didn't steal your content, they just linked to it with snippets. Besides, if you didn't want Google to index you stuff, all you had to do was ask. Am I missing something here or is Copiepresse just stupid? Er, I guess they won the lawsuit, so maybe it's the Belgian judge who ruled in their favor who's not playing with a full deck.

Labels: copiepresse, google, lawsuits

Google is notorious for giving weak results for backlinks to a site using the link: command. They just released a new link tool as part of their webmaster tools that shows a lot more links to your site than you can see using the normal link: search. They say that it's still not all the links they know about, but it's a lot more than they used to offer, so it's definitely an improvement.

Danny Sullivan has a pretty comprehensive overview of the new link reporting tool.

I've tried it out just briefly and for most sites I've checked it provides a lot more useful information, but for at least one site, the new tool isn't showing any links to the homepage of the site, which is obviously not right, since a simple link: search shows nearly 100 links. Probably just a glitch, so I'll keep an eye on it.

To use the new tool, you just need to verify that you own the site through Google's webmaster central--although there have been reports that you can access link data on sites that you don't own. I'm sure they'll patch that hole quickly if they haven't already.

Labels: google, links

If you've spent more than a few minutes messing with Google Earth you're a geek. In fact, if you're reading this blog, chances are you're a geek. Well since you're a geek, you might like to send a geek greeting like this from GeoGreeting.com. They use Google earth images of buildings that look like letters. Sweet! I'm sending one to mom!

Labels: geeks, google, google earth, greetings

I figured the year-end Zeitgeist data wasn't necessarily just a list of the most popular searches for the year. This hunch was confirmed by this post on the Google blog that explains how they compile the data for that report. Basically, they look for keyword searches that were unique to 2006. It makes sense to highlight these poipular searches instead of just offering up the same list of "maps", "dictionary", "yellow pages", "games", etc. every single year. I'm hoping to find some time in the next few days to review all the various "top searches in 2006" lists from the different search engines to see if I can pull anything useful from them.

I may or may not have time for that due to the extra business of getting ready for a week-long vaction the second week of January.

Labels: 2006, google, search, zeitgeist