SEO:Search

ComScore did what Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and Digg only dreamed of.

ComScore killed the search engine star.

ComScore data on Google paid clicks rocked the world this week. The proprietary comScore qSearch report was analyzed to death by Wall St. analysts and media pundits. Data: summarized and judged; Google, convicted, flogged and sentenced to an early demise.

It wasn’t hit and run, though: comScore’s SVP of Media and Search, James Lamberti, and CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Magid Abraham delve deep into the data to correct the rush to judgment in the marketplace. It’s a must-read. Great analysis; surprisingly lifeless title: “Why Google’s surprising paid click data are less surprising.”

It should’ve been “Data doesn’t kill Google, people do.”

QSearch showed a 7 percent decline in January ‘08 vs. December ‘07. Paid click annual growth? Flat for Google.

Month-over-month the number of paid clicks per search on Google dropped by 8 percent (December ‘07 to January ‘08). Consumers clicking less on search ads? Maybe. A weaker buying appetite?

Google’s share price took a hit and rebounded. Reports of Google’s early demise? Greatly exaggerated. That doesn’t mean the momentum-driven Google shares won’t take a hit if Google fails to impress the Street this quarter.

Wall St. analysts - looking for clues where Google gives no guidance - had accomplices: mainstream media and bloggers hoping for a Google stumble.

No one wants to miss the Hindenburg. The only problem? The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly when Google news goes viral.

The Google backlash reared its ugly head and this time it wasn’t just Valleywag.

LendingTree whose multimillion dollar paid search campaigns are managed by search marketing firm Efficient Frontier, made public its new online marketing strategy: cutting back on PPC or paid search.

LendingTree spokesperson Allison Vail was quoted in CNET News.com by Stefanie Olsen.

“With the Fed changes in January, we were driving natural traffic. It’s smarter for us,” said Vail.

Our readers know it’s always smart to optimize for natural search. I’m not sure anecdotal evidence from a financial services pure play in the throes of a global subprime mortgage crisis proves paid search revenues are declining.

Statistics from search marketing firms, though, would lend credence to the argument.

For average CPC (Cost Per Click) by industry vertical (Financial Services, Mortgage, Credit, Auto), click here.

Efficient Frontier Chairman Ellen Siminoff, chairman told CNET that paid search advertising spendi in financial services has typically risen between 30 percent and 50 percent annually.

So far this year it’s either flat or down for some companies. credit and mortgage advertisers raised their spending by 24 percent, but this year, their spending has risen only 3 percent year over year, according to Efficient Frontier data.

Coming soon: Efficient Frontier / Search Engine Watch Average CPC data for February.

Be the first investment banker or hedge fund manager on your block to see the stats.

With sitemaps cross-hosting (or cross-submission), Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft cracked open the door for corporations to outsource search engine optimization.

How big a deal is this?

Not enough to make Robert Scoble cry. Or join the circus.

When SEL broke the news at SMX (described in excellent summary by Vanessa Fox of vanessfoxnude fame), I was hoping for a revolutionary change. Then I read the blog posts at the Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Search and Live Search Webmaster Center blogs so you don’t have to. (I’m just kidding all you search engine PR gals … and guy.)

Robots.txt ruined my night. I felt like I was decepticonned - hoping for the breakthrough that would make outsourcing SEO much easier for major corporations. Or an announcement that might provide guidance for SEOs to improve rankings for their clients.

SEW Experts SEM Crossfire columnist Chris Boggs ended the robots nightmare: “I think it’s a big step forward in making it easier for companies to outsource, but the caveat is having full access to the robots.txt. Some industries such as banking and pharma may still have issues.”

Still, we don’t want to beat up on the search engines (unnecessarily). In the past, search engines required companies with multiple Web sites to have “one set of servers to rule them all.”

In short, search engines required sitemaps to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contained. That meant the same server needed to host both sitemaps and site content.

Google, Yahoo and Live Search put aside their fierce competition for a moment to make life a little easier for Webmasters and SEOs by standardizing sitemaps in November 2006, when the Big Three formed Sitemaps.org.

SEW Experts By The Numbers columnist, Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, noted, “The announcement affects Web site owners who don’t have the freedom to place a sitemaps file in the root directory of the domain. Historically, site owners without the ability to place a file in the root folder for their domain haven’t been able to make use of sitemaps.”

A cross-hosting sitemaps scenario or two?

“There are many scenarios. Shared hosting environments and people in large corporations who may be running subdomains of a much larger site,” said Enge. “This now allows them to place the sitemaps file in a different location, even on another server or domain. The sitemaps file then needs to be pointed to by the robots.txt file for the original domain. The site owner will still need the ability to make that change.”

Search Engine Watch, for example, has several domains and subdomains. Our main domain, searchenginewatch.com, features a few subdomains: blog.searchenginewatch.com, forums.searchenginewatch.com and jobs.searchenginewatch.com, for example.

Now we can host all our sitemaps in one location or subdomain: such as “notreally-oursitemaps.searchenginewatch.com.”

So what does cross-hosting mean for the global SEO community?

“Ultimately this opens up the site maps protocol to a large number of site owners who couldn’t make use of it before,” said Enge. “The SEO impact really relates to that fact. SEOs may not have been able to use sitemaps on a site previously, due to the limitations of the prior implementation. Now those SEOs have the capability available to them.”

Cool.

“The impact of offsite hosting for sitemaps? It will make it easier for sitemap management by allowing site owners to manage multiple sitemaps in one location,” explained Lee Odden of TopRank. “It will also make it easier for those with sites that use subdomains.”

So bottom line: will SEOs be able to leverage cross-hosting to improve rankings for targeted keywords?

“As for impact on rankings, it’s no different than the effect of making sitemap data available previously,” said Odden. “Providing a list of URLs to search engines serves as a supplemental source of information to what their spiders would find in the wild.”

Here’s how it works:

“Search engines make no guarantee that providing URLs in a sitemap will increase the number of pages indexed - but they might,” said Odden. “So in that regard, making it easier for sites that previously did not provide sitemaps, especially subdomains, may help them get more pages indexed, but I see no effect on actual rankings.”

For the Google Guy’s take on sitemaps, nofollow and other great tips, read the highest ranked Matt Cutts interview ever done (by Eric Enge).

Yahoo originally helped the Chinese government to jail dissidents, but after receiving public blame they now show regrets and push for release of dissidents. In their blog they write: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to Beijing next week to discuss a wide range of political issues with senior Chinese officials.

Yahoo Pushes for Dissident Release

With deep appreciation for the power of diplomacy and government-to-government engagement on human rights issues, we believe we have a window of opportunity for freedom. Yesterday, -Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang- sent a letter to Secretary Rice urging the State Departments continued assistance in securing the release of Shi Tao, Wang Xiaoning, and other political dissidents imprisoned for expressing their views online.

-Jerry Yang- pressed for continued government assistance in advocating for the release of dissidents. Over the past two years, legal and policy executives at Yahoo! have met with -non-government organizations- to discuss strategies for securing the release of political dissidents. Weve also met with senior Chinese officials and asked directly for the release of Mr. Shi and Mr. Wang. We understand our responsibilities, and we take them with the utmost seriousness. We also recognize the practical limits of corporate diplomacy, especially next to the powerful advocacy tools available to governments. We believe governments have the most leverage to influence the decision-making of other governments.

The stakes ” personal freedom ” are high for those unfairly imprisoned and for their families. This is one reason weve established a Human Rights Fund to provide humanitarian and legal support for these dissidents, as well as for their families. The Fund will be administered by noted dissident Harry Wu ” who spent nineteen years in a Chinese labor camp ” through his Laogai Research Foundation.

Wikipedia has more on the Shi Tao case, writing:

On April 20, 2004, the Chinese government released the Number 11 document A notice concerning the work for maintaining stability (”). In the document, it warned journalists that overseas pro-democracy Chinese dissidents may come back to mainland China during the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 on June 4th, which would affect the politico-social orders stability. It asked all news media to not report anything regarding the so-called June 4th event, Falun Gong or people calling for politico-social change. Shi used his private Yahoo! email account and sent a brief of the document to an overseas web site called Asia Democracy Foundation.

When the Chinese government found out, it demanded the senders personal information from Yahoo!s Hong Kong office. Yahoo! turned the information over without asking what it was for. Shortly thereafter, Shi Tao was detained on November 24, 2004. The Chinese authorities confiscated his computer and documents without showing any proper permit or document, and warned his family members not to talk about it with others. He was formally arrested on December 14.

His lawyer, Guo Guoting (), famous for taking human rights cases, stated that the search and seizure and subsequent arrest were illegal. As a result, his license to practice law was suspended for one year by Shanghais Department of Law. He was later put under house arrest, and one of his co-workers had to take over the case.

In 2005, Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years.

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The question comes up often in search marketing circles: Is now the time for search engine marketing standards? In today’s SEM Crossfire column, “Standards for SEO and SEM: The Time is Now,” Chris Boggs outlines a proposal for standards that define common tactics and assign them a risk level to help search marketers make wise decisions about the most appropriate search marketing plan for their situation.

Do you agree with Chris? Please share your thoughts on establishing SEO standards at the Search Engine Watch Forums.

In many industries, regulatory issues can add considerable complexity to an SEO implementation. The challenge is not to let that complexity get in the way of a campaign’s success. In today’s Outsourced column, “Drowning in Red Tape: SEO and Pharma Regulations,” William Flaiz describes some ways to navigate the waters of SEO for a pharmaceutical client.

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• 7 Ways Brands Can “Get Social”
  Many brands are wary of exposing themselves on social media sites, but as anyone who’s been involved in social media for more than five minutes knows, they’re too late.
• Schedule optimization for SES New York
  The biggest Search Engine Strategies conference of the year will be held the week of March 17 in New York City.
• Yahoo Changes Minimum Bid Policy on Search Ads
  Instead of setting all minimum bids at $0.10, Yahoo will now allow the market to set a variable minimum bid.
• SEW Experts: Google is an Optimist. Newspapers are Pessimists.
  The Internet is a speeding freight train. If newspapers, and for that matter all traditional media, don’t begin immediately to think drastically different, the train will pass them by.
• SEW Experts: Online SEO Training Options
  There are both benefits and drawbacks to taking an online SEO training course.

Click to read the rest of this post…

Many brands are wary of exposing themselves on social media sites, but as anyone who’s been involved in social media for more than five minutes knows, they’re too late. In today’s SearchDay, "The Role of the Brand in Social Media Marketing," Userplane's Mike Jones shares seven social marketing tactics to help your brand "get social" and join the conversation:

1. Boost the Fun Factor
2. See the Forest and the Trees
3. Widgets are Welcome
4. Conversation is King
5. Engage
6. Research and Listen
7. Don’t Go It Alone

The biggest Search Engine Strategies conference of the year will be held the week of March 17 in New York City. Whether this will be your first SES New York, or the fifth one in a row that you’ve attended since 2004, you might appreciate some free advice on schedule optimization.

One look at the conference at a glance will tell you why. There are more than 70 workshops, keynotes, panels and sessions over the four-day Search Engine Strategies conference. And, on the fifth day, there are an additional six SEM training classes following SES New York.

Since there are five concurrent tracks during the four-day Search Engine Strategies conference and three concurrent workshops during the fifth day of SEM training, no one can attend everything. This is not daunting to the first-time attendee. It is also a challenge to someone like me, who attended SES New York in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. I’m looking at last year’s conference handbook and this year’s conference at a glance and more than 70% of the sessions are new!

Now, Danny Sullivan programmed last year’s show and Kevin Ryan organized this year’s agenda. But, that’s only one of the factors driving the dramatic changes in the content at the event.

On the last day of last year’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City, Google announced its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, which is still pending. A couple of weeks later, Yahoo! acquired the remaining 80% of Right Media for $680 million. Then, last May, Microsoft acquired aQuantive for $6 billion. Last July, Microsoft acquired AdECN for an undisclosed amount of money and in September, Yahoo! acquired BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Then, on Feb. 1 of this year, Microsoft proposed to acquire Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.

That’s a lot of M&A news for the industry to digest – and our search engine marketing definition needs to be rewritten this year.

And our search engine optimization definition needs to be totally rewritten, too.

About a month after last year’s SES New York, Google announced its critical first steps toward a universal search model that offers users a more integrated and comprehensive way to search for and view information online. It was the biggest thing to hit the search engine marketing industry since Google’s Florida Update in November 2003.

In June 2007, Ask3D was launched. In September 2007, Microsoft launched its biggest update to Live Search since its debut in January 2005. And in October 2007, “an all new Yahoo! Search experience” was launched.

Meanwhile, comScore reports that YouTube, Google Image Search, Google Maps and Google News are approaching 1.6 billion searches a month, which is more than Live Search. In other words, Google (6.2 billion searches a month) is the #1 search engine, Yahoo! (2.4 billion) is #2, YouTube and all other Google “expanded” search sites (1.6 billion) would be #3, and Microsoft’s Live Search (1 billion) is #4.

So, is it any wonder that even SES alumni are heading back to New York?

So, to help industry veterans as well as search newbies, I’ve put together the optimized schedule below for the Search Engine Strategies conference that starts on Saint Patrick’s Day in the Big Apple.

Now, when you get to SES New York, you’ll make adjustments on the fly. As Bob Shirilla of Keepsakes Etc. told me at SES Chicago back in December, “I had a detailed game plan when I came to SES, but I’m calling a lot of audibles.”

Nevertheless, schedule optimization will help you get the return on marketing investment that you’re looking for. Here are the workshops, keynotes, panels and sessions that I’d recommend:

Day 1 - Monday, March 17, 2008

9:30-10:45am
Creating Compelling Ads
Organic Listings Forum

11:15am-12:30pm
Analytics: Data Into Action
Igniting Viral Campaigns

2:00-3:15pm
Web Analytics: Measuring Success
Auditing Paid Listings and Click Fraud Issues

3:45-5:00pm
Orion Panel: Getting Vertical Search Right

Day 2 - Tuesday, March 18, 2008

9:00-10:00am
Conference Welcome and Opening Keynote
Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Nick Carr, SES New York 2008, The Big Switch

11:00am-12:15pm
Introduction to Search Engine Marketing
Ads in a Quality Score World

1:30-2:45pm
Orion Panel: Universal Search

3:15-4:30pm (Sponsored Sessions)
Hitwise: Know about Your Competitors’ Paid and Organic Traffic
Google: What’s new with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer?

4:45-6:00pm
Search Engine Friendly Design
Ad Copy & Landing Page Clinic

Day 3 - Wednesday, March 19, 2008

9:00-9:45am
Morning Keynote
Gordon McLeod: Search Has Changed Everything… And So Can You

10:15-11:30am
Link Building Basics
Ad Testing: Research & Findings

1:00-2:15pm
Search Advertising 101
Top Search Trends

2:30-3:30pm
Afternoon Keynote
Jason Calacanis, Founder & CEO of Mahalo.com, Inc.

4:00-5:15pm
The New Face of In-House Search
Social Media Research: Informing Search Strategies

5:30-6:45pm
The Business Case for SEO Content Development: Turning Words Into Action!
Ad Exchanges Are Changing Everything

Day 4 - Thursday, March 20, 2008

9:00-9:45am
Morning Keynote
Andrew Tomkins, Chief Scientist at Yahoo! Research

10:00-11:00am
Usability & SEO: 2 Wins For The Price of 1
Podcast & Audio Search Optimization

11:15am-12:15pm
Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions
Images & Search Engines

12:45-1:45pm
Meet the Crawlers
Video Search Optimization

But wait! There’s more!

On Friday, March 21, there are six half-day SEM training classes, which can be taken in addition to the SES New York conference or independently – at an additional cost.

Again, look over the descriptions of each workshop to see which ones are for you. But, here are the SEM training classes that I’d recommend:

8:00am-12:00pm
Link and Reputation Workshop
Optimizing for Universal Search

1:00-5:00pm
Search & Analytics Workshop: Using Analytics to Increase Search Effectiveness
The 7 Step RSS/Content Syndication/SEO Strategy

If you register for the Search Engine Strategies conference by tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 29, you can save $150. Conference attendees get free access to Market Motive training and Bruce Clay tools. And, if you attend SES New York, you could win a Scion xB! A free drawing will take place on Wednesday, March 19, in the Expo Hall.

I should disclose that Search Engine Strategies is now a client, but I’ve been writing about SES since 2002, when the March event was still held in Boston.

The search engine marketing industry has been totally transformed since then. For example, the keynote speaker at my first Search Engine Strategies conference was from Terra Lycos.

Remember them?

That’s why both industry veterans as well as search newbies will be heading to SES New York in a couple of weeks. The newbies will want to learn everything they can. And the veterans need to relearn most of what was being taught just a few years ago.

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR and Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit at SES London 2008

According to comScore data released today, Ask.com had the biggest jump in search queries. By that measurement, Ask had more growth than Google, MSN, or Yahoo last month (January 2008) compared to the prior months volume. Ask has a small piece of search market share but they have been a leader in universal search.

Underdog Ask.com Grows 20% in January

That is, they integrate search results for more than web sites - but for images, video, local information, news, blogs, and other media. Ask got further into social media integration with their recently launched social news aggregation site BigNews.

Of course, Ask occupies a tiny sliver of the overall search volume. Heres the breakdown on the top 4 search engines:

• Google Sites - 7.7 billion searches (comScore says Google got 58.4% of searches in January)
• Yahoo! - almost 2.5 billion searches
• Microsoft - 1.1 billion searches
• AOL - 903 million searches
• Ask.com - under 500 million searches and about 4% of the market

Ask.com Facts from Ross Dunn at StepForth:

• They dont have a nofollow on any of their links
• Local businesses can submit their business manually to Asks local portal AskCity. If youre not included and want to be, you have to send an email request.
• Ask owns blog reader Bloglines and they rank blogs partly based on their popularity on Bloglines.

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Yahoo this week changed the way it will set minimum bids on some keywords in Sponsored Search ads in the U.S., bringing it closer in line with Google’s policy. Instead of setting all minimum bids at $0.10, Yahoo will now allow the market to set a variable minimum bid. That means that in some cases, the minimum will be above $0.10, and in other cases it could be lower.

The minimum bids will be set based on the relevance of ads to a keyword, the number of bidders and their bid amounts. It will not be based on advertiser conversions. These kinds of factors are already used by Yahoo to rank ads based on a quality score, but the difference now applies to the minimum bid, or reserve price.

Google changed its minimum bid structure in July 2005. Many advertisers were not happy with the move at the time, but so far there does not seem to be much outcry in blogs or search marketing forums.

A key difference between Yahoo’s new method and Google’s is the institution of alerts and a grace period when the bid on a given keyword is about to fall below the minimum. Yahoo will notify advertisers in their Account Dashboard if a bid is about to drop below the minimum, and will offer a grace period of up to a few days to allow the advertiser to raise their bid to keep the keyword active.

The first batch of keywords goes live in the U.S. with the new reserve pricing model over the next few weeks, with more keywords to be added internationally in the future.