SEO:Search

The Economist is drawing up plans for a social network following the decision to invest in its site and socialise its content.

Yahoo! has revealed plans to roll out Panama, its online ad platform, on mobile early next year.

The BBC will roll out a major integrated marketing campaign to promote the launch of its iPlayer next week, with digital media at the heart of the media strategy.

GCap Media has signed a major partnership deal with Apple to enable radio listeners to purchase music from station-branded areas within the iTunes Music Store.

Mobile operator 3 has relaunched its portal as an ad-funded proposition, with debut advertisers including Coca-Cola, EA and Yell.

Sortprice - a price comparison search engine - is doing its part this holiday season with a guide to safely purchasing online without falling victim to identity theft. If you are traveling in New York City between Dec. 19 and December 23rd, people will be distributing cards with safety tips for online buyers.

Taking the cause offline and to the busiest city on the planet is an interesting approach and one I want to follow.

Paul Allen, Microsoft cofounder, has registered to bid in the upcoming auction for the 700-megahertz spectrum scheduled for January 24, 2008. This is the same auction that Google has shown much interest in developing.

“Allen heads an investment company called Vulcan Capital and is also a majority shareholder in U.S. cable operator Charter Communications,” Reuters reported. 

The official Google Webmaster Central blog has a post on it titled Taking feeds out of our web search results.

With this post Google defines a precise policy regarding the indexing or no-indexing of feeds. In summary, Google is officially not going to index any feeds, with the exception of multimedia feeds such as Podcast feeds.

The most interesting part of this to me was the rationale - it turns out that the majority of non-multimedia feeds represent content already on HTML web pages, and many times these pages contain additional content beyond what is in the feed itself. When Google sees a scenario like this, the web page with the content, and the feed with the content are pretty much duplicate content for each other. Given that the HTML page has a strong chance of being the superior solution.

This happens less frequently with multimedia feeds such as Podcasts. For that reason, Google will continue to index Podcast feeds. Publishers who want their Podcast feed Noindexed can do so can follow the Yahoo Guidelines, or if they use Feedburner they can easily set this up within Feedburner.

I think it’s great that Google has defined a clear policy for this. Now webmasters know exactly what they are dealing with. Of course, there will be some webmasters who want their (non-multimedia) feed indexed, and that have relied on that traditionally. However, this is no longer an option, and it behooves such webmasters to figure out how to get that content rendered on an HTML web page which is crawlable by Google. 

SEO for Large Enterprises means content development on a massive scale. In today’s By the Numbers column, “Large Enterprise SEO: Content Development,” Eric Enge explains that the motivation for addressing the challenges goes beyond duplicate content and poor quality pages. 

The holiday season is a time for sharing, spending time with family, and the time for writers everywhere to hopelessly pontificate about the coming year. In today’s Searching for Meaning column, “Yahoo, Facebook, Life and Death,” Kevin Ryan offers his best baseless, unaccountable predictions for 2008.