SEO:Search

Googles had a tough time over the last couple years, with Wall Street Analysts expecting almost exponential growth. When they first missed estimates, growing only 58% in Q2 2007 (the losers), some analysts thought it was the beginning of the end. While theyve bounced back from time to time…

Google Beats Q3 Estimates

…(such as Q1 2008), Google is probably pretty happy to finally be sticking it to the analysts where it hurts the most”the bottom line”as they post an estimate-beating Q3, with 31% YOY growth in revenues. Paid clicks were up 18% YOY

Business Week reports on the earnings call, as well. Highlights include the Q&A session, which focused heavily on the current state of the economy:

Question about whether advertisers are changing behavior because of the economy. Not really, says Varian: Advertisers are willing to take all the clicks we can give them at the current CPCs (cost per click), and he thinks that will continue regardless of the economy.

Question about impact of economy on retail given eBays bearish outlook-*-: Varian, as he did last quarter, still think Google could actually benefit as people are careful about shopping and search even more for better deals.

Question about improvement in margins”from cost cutting or change in advertising arrangements? Pichette: Across all categories of expenses, people have been very diligent in watching expenses. Hiring was less than in previous quarters. Capital expenditures were lowest since Q1 2006, another analyst notes.

*eBays bearish outlook: eBay is finally back in the black, but its reported earnings today still left many analysts worried about eBays long-term outlook.

Googles stocks closed up 9%, which is a heck of a lot better than when they reported only 58% growth, with stocks closing down 7%.

What do you think”is Google a buy or a sell?

Included links: Google’s Q2 Revenue

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Yahoos unveiling a new display and radio ad campaign today. The campaign, which is targeted to fight Google, touts Yahoos safe results and easy-to-use interface. One banner ad adjures us: Dont get lost in all the links: A radio ad advertises the SafeSearch feature, which uses …

Ease of Use

…McAfee to indicate which sites in a SERP might contain potentially dangerous downloads:

The SafeSearch feature is nice, but again, if you have that info, why include dangerous sites in the results at all? And perhaps Yahoo is easier to use for some users. Which of the following two looks easier to use to you:

Or

?

While the ads are cute and may even be accurate, I dont know that these will be enough to convert users. Unless Yahoo has something truly substantial to backup its claim that itll help you not get lost in all the links, I dont think the difference will be big enough to make people change their default behavior.

Google, meanwhile, is shopping around for ad agencies.

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All you web crawlers out there, cheer up, as the latest news is that the Webmasters Tools API has now been updated! This would allow the users to get numerous features like: * Crawl Rate * Geographic Location * Preferred Domain * Enhanced Image Search…

Gdata API updated with Site Settings

Let us see as to what the Official Google Webmaster has to say on the whole issue: The Webmaster Tools GData API has been updated to allow you to get even more out of Webmaster Tools, such as setting a geographic location or your preferred domain. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Gdata, it’s a protocol for reading and writing data on the web. GData makes it very easy to communicate with many Google services, like Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools GData API already allows you to add and verify sites for your account and to submit Sitemaps programmatically. Now you can also access and update site-specific information. This is especially useful if you have a large number of sites. With the Webmaster Tools API, you can perform hundreds of operations in the time that it would take to add and verify a single site through the web interface.

What can I do?

We’ve included four new features in the API. You can see and update these settings for each site that you have verified. The features are:

Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server’s capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.

Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn’t reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide informationto help us determine where your target users are located.

Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.

Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.

How do I do it?

We provide you with Java code samples for all the current Webmaster Tools API functionality. Here’s a sample snippet of code that takes a list of sites and updates the geographic location of all of them:

// Authenticate against the Webmaster Tools service

WebmasterToolsService service;

try {service = new WebmasterToolsService(”exampleCo-exampleApp-1″);

service.setUserCredentials(USERNAME, PASSWORD);} catch (AuthenticationException e) {System.out.println(”Error while authenticating.”);return;}

// Read sites and geolocations from your database
readSitesAndGeolocations(sitesList, geolocationsList);

// Update all sites
Iterator sites = sitesList.iterator();Iterator geolocations = geolocationsList.iterator(); while (sites.hasNext() && geolocations.hasNext()) {
// Create a blank entry and add the updated information

SitesEntry updateEntry = new SitesEntry();
updateEntry.setGeolocation(geolocations.next());

// Get the URL to update the site

String encodedSiteId = URLEncoder.encode(sites.next(),”UTF-8″);
URL siteUrl = new URL(”http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/feeds/sites/“
+ encodedSiteId);

// Update the site
service.update(siteUrl, updateEntry);}

Where do I get it?

The main page for the Webmaster Tools GData API explains all the details of the API. It has a detailed reference guide and also many code snippets that explain how to use the Java client library, which is available for download. You can find more details about GData and all the different Google APIs in the Google Data API homepage. By Javier Tordable, Software Engineer

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Pause Button Pressed on Yahoogle - As the time for implementation of the Google/Yahoo agreement drew near, there was little doubt that some sort of action by the US Dept. of Justice would surface. It remains to be seen what direction the DOJ will go, but there is obviously something happening.

Search Engine Turmoil

On Friday, both search engine giants announced a delay in moving this initiative forward. This move seems contrary to the previous position of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, which indicated that the deal would proceed as planned.

What this delay portends is still anyone’s guess. For now, the waiting game that kicked off in June will continue.

Will Yahoo Acquire AOL?

This has certainly been a busy and yet, unproductive year for Yahoo. Beginning with the failed takeover bid by Microsoft, followed by the looming uncertainty over the Google deal, one can only wonder what’s next.

While talk of a partial acquisition by Yahoo of AOL services has been ongoing for some time, nothing concrete has come about. The consensus seemed to be that this was a move designed to increase Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo, if not to thwart the takeover altogether. If that was the case, then it stopped making sense months ago.

Likely, Yahoo looks upon this potential acquisition as a way to expand both their content services and advertising revenue.

Despite indications of progress, details of these discussions seem as vague and uncertain as anything else involving Yahoo of late.

So far this year, we’ve seen Microhoo, Yahoogle and YAhOoL. I wonder if we’ll see YAskhoo! next.

Perhaps we should start a betting pool, winner take all if guessing the correct date when (if) Yahoo will actually successfully conclude one of their negotiations this year.

Microsoft Search Incentives

While Google innovates and Yahoo spins around in circles, Microsoft adds an unusual approach to gaining additional search market share.

Beginning last spring with the launch of the Cash Back program, Microsoft introduced the notion of search advertising rebate incentives. This allows advertisers a means of paying for advertising on a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) basis and buyers some savings on purchases. If you are unfamiliar with this, Techcrunch did a great analysis of this feature. While many had doubts about this approach, it appears to be working.

Last week, Microsoft added to this type of service by releasing >SearchPerks!, another means of attracting traffic through a points-based reward system. While this is not a new concept, it certainly is unique in the search engine world.

Participating users can expect to receive rewards for redeeming saved up “tickets”. There are many types of rewards, such as air miles, music downloads and more. This is a limited time offer and sign up for participation expires on Dec 31, 2008.

While it’s too early to tell, some believe this idea does have potential.

No surprise to anyone, this feature is only available to Internet Explorer users. That leaves me out of this program. Like many people, not only do I find that browser (regardless which version) extremely annoying and frustrating to use, I resent Microsoft’s constant efforts to restrict compatibility for so many services and 3rd party applications to their browser alone.

Included links: Google/Yahoo Agreement

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The count down is on to the official release of Google Search alerts via RSS. Google will unveil the new RSS alert service for Web Search, which will sit aside it’s current email alerts. Web search alerts make it easier for website and business owners to keep track of their listings and references in Google’s web results.

Track Your Business

Google currently offers RSS alerts for its News and Blog search services, but is the last of the top 3 search engines to offer feed alerts on its core search results. Microsoft and Yahoo! have offered RSS alerts for quite some time.

For those of you wondering what’s so special about Google Search RSS alerts, it makes tracking your site/business in the search engine much easier.

You’ll get an automate update every time Google indexes new content that references a particular keyword or search term such as your website or business.

For example, I have “ineedhits” set up as a Google alert. So everytime Google’s spiders crawl and index a web page that references us, I get an alert.

It helps me keep up to date on our reputation online, check some of our SEO strategies and generally keep my finger on the pulse. It’s also a great way to keep on top of what your competitors are doing.

If you want to assess the value of alerts, I suggest signing up for some of Google’s email alerts and and you’ll see just how valuable Google Web alerts are…

I’ll be sure to let you know when the Google Search RSS alerts go live.

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We wrote about a potential Yahoo Analytics service being released however that never really made it to fruition until Yahoo acquired IndexTools earlier this year. Today Dennis Mortensen, Director of Data Insights at Yahoo posted his blog that IndexTools is now officially: “Yahoo Web Analytics.”

Yahoo Web Analytics

Major changes include a complete re-branding from IndexTools to Yahoo Web Analytics, enhancements to the tool, a new website and some increased scalability. Yahoo Web Analytics also includes single sign on so you can access the rest of the Yahoo tools without having to re-enter your credentials. I am glad I still have access because and can’t wait to test drive the new Yahoo Web Analytics.

Below is a snippet from Dennis’ Post:

Google Labs has launched an experimental audio search which allows one to search text within YouTube videos. Google Audio Indexing, its called. On the backend, Google has taken the audio tracks of YouTube videos of politicians, and automatically converted it to text for search capability.

Audio Search

How will this impact the overall internet? Well, here-to-fore, videos were mostly searched on metadata ” that is, text associated with a video indicated what the video was about. Videos posted on web pages might have other, typical webpage attributes that are already used in keyword search, such as Title, H1, body text content, anchor text of links pointing to the page, etc. Now, if/when Google rolls this functionality in a wider fashion to apply to more than just politicians videos, any spoken words within videos will add to the keyword content associated with them, becoming searchable.

As you may be aware, Google rolled out Universal Search in the past year, their branded version of Blended Search. Blended Search in search engines allows keyword search results pages to provide result listings from a multitude of other, specialized vertical search information sources. Video search, image search, news search, local search, and other vertical search results are all showing up in search engine results pages these days, whereas those results pages used to display only listings of general web pages.

Considering all the rich verbal content there is to be found in videos, I think we can expect to see video results appearing more and more in the blended search results as time goes by.

Even more interesting/compelling: will Google productize their software for converting spoken content into text? Similar to the Google Translate tool, this could be really useful to many people.

Included links: Google Blog Audio Indexing and Google Audio Indexing

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Hot on Asks heels, the semantic search engine Hakia launches a redesign today, too. Aside from the new SERP layout, Hakia is testing the use of peer-reviewed credible sites and a personal start page. As a tab on the redesigned SERP, Hakia offers an option to refine your results to sites…

Is It Enough?

…that have been peer-reviewed to meet strict noncommerciality and credibility standards. The results from credible sites, however, are limited to only queries in the areas of health and the environment”and even then, not all of them:

However, for queries where they do have results, its definitely nice to know the information is coming from a site you someone can trust, even if the first two snippets here are terrible:

The default SERP has also seen some changes, with a three-column layout and different areas for the usual ten blue links that everyone seems to want to get beyond, images, UGC, other types of results and, of course, ads:

Im a bit disappointed with the results here for -Witchy Woman-: Of the ten blue links, only two are actually about the Eagles song, including the Wikipedia entry thats also listed under UGC (compared to seven of ten on Google and four of ten on Yahoo, but on par with Lives results). Only Hakia and Yahoo have relevant ads, both of which included items advertised including the ever popular Find witchy woman at -store-. Shop and Save at -store-. Nobodys going to advertise to download the Eagles song? Sigh.

Another tab on the SERPs leads to my hakia, a customizable start page thats pretty standard fare for that genre:

So in all, the redesigns not bad, and the credible sites feature is cool”if youre looking for something in health or the environment. I hope they expand that into other subject areas soon before interest fades.

But will this be enough for Hakia to take off?

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Well, it must be that time of year. You know when the leaves change colors and Ask changes their design? At some point they have to settle on something. They are actually starting to act like your different cousin who shows up at family functions with a new body piercing and a bad attitude just…

Same Old Answer

…for shock value. You pay attention for a minute then you realize that its actually really sad that she doesnt get it.

Ask.com is starting to feel that way in the realm of search engines. Once full of promise and ready to take on the big boys of search (which is now just one big boy and Ask partners with them anyway; dare to guess who?) they are now becoming a bit of a search sideshow. In todays WSJ we learn that a new and improved Ask.com is on the horizon (see screenshot). There are two points that are interesting here. First is Barry Dillers spin on this redesign:

To call it an all-new Ask is wrong; its an evolution of Ask. I think its going to help us primarily in retention and frequency. That is really the goal.

Ok, this begs to Ask; retention and frequency of what? I dont use the engine personally and know few who do. Secondly, Ask is now the largest of five pieces of IAC / Interactive Corp. broke their offerings into in August. Purchased for $2 billion in 2005, thats a lot of dollars to recoup. When the big overhaul of Ask to Ask3D (I didnt even know it had a code name until this article) the company spent $100 million on advertising. Thats some serious weight behind and an effort. Problem is it netted them virtually nothing. It feels like they cant get beyond being just a footnote in the search industry. To that end they plan to spend a whopping $5 million to introduce the latest evolution and test consumer response.

As Johnny Cash sang I hear the train a comin, its rollin round the bend and with Ask this will most likely become a train wreck. The executives that were interviewed were pointing to small gains in market share (i.e. corporate speak for we are NOT irrelevant). Lastly, it is still a financial success due to its relationship with another search engine that provides their ads. You guessed it: Google. With the Yahoo! deal (which is on hold) and this arrangement with Ask, Google is starting to look more and more like the ridiculously wealthy relative who feeds money and opportunity to the less fortunate in the family just because they have a heart. I dont suspect that Ask will ever be a real player in search. Just ask anyone you know if they use it. Thats evidence enough.

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“Freshness is everything” as far as documents are concerned! That is what Google thinks about the issue concerning the “stale vs fresh contents” topic. Google’s Historical Data Patent reviewed at WebmasterWorld on what Google and SearchEngineJournal has to remark on fresh documents as well as stale contents.

Stale vs Fresh

Bill Slawski has done a great job by giving these examples:

• The Constitution of the United States is an old document, but it’s not stale. A news article about the “World Series” from 1918 may not be what a baseball fan wants to see when searching for “World Series” this October.
• While Babe Ruth is well known as a feared slugger for the New York Yankees, he’s not as well remembered from his earlier days as a Boston Red Sox pitcher who threw a shutout in that 1918 World Series. Interesting information, but again, not what a searcher is likely to be looking for in an October 2008 search for “World Series.”

A search engine might look at information from different sources to learn about:

1. The age of a document
2. The age of links leading to and from that document

According to Google,

Stale content refers to documents that have not been updated for a period of time and, thus, contain stale data (documents that are “no longer updated, diminished in importance, superceded by another document”).

The staleness of a document may be based on:

• document creation date,
• anchor growth, traffic,
• content change,
• forward/back link growth, etc.

According to Google patent, there are 4 factors that determine the “stale” factor of a document:

• Query-based factor;
• Link-based criteria;
• Traffic - based criteria;
• User-behavior-based criteria

Query-based factor: are those factors that analyze as to which pages in SERPs are selected by users.

Link-based factor: analyzes the page backlinks.

Traffic - based criteria: If there is a large reduction in traffic, then it may mean that the content or the document is stale.

User-behavior-based criteria: if people spend too little time on the page, then chances are that the contents are not fresh.

Links included: Google’s Historical Data Patent, WebmasterWorld Review and SearchEngineJournal

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