Online Marketing Blog

Interesting posts regarding Microsoft/MSN recently:

Dvorak says Microsoft’s marketing sucks – from Scobleizer (and he agrees). Put the ad money into making a better product like Amazon and Google have.

MSN Search – Flop with Search Community – from Threadwatch. NickW stirs things up.

Does the New MSN Search Hold Up? – from Google Blogscoped (OK, this was from last week, but it seems to fit) Search comparison between MSN, Google and Yahoo.

I was very optimistic about the new MSN search, hopeful really, that something new would come out and provide a worthy alternative to the current dominance in search engines. Not because I don’t like Google and Yahoo search, I use Google many, many times a day and Yahoo.com is my homepage. It just seems that at the moment, MSN search isn’t doing the WOW thing (accurate search results) as much as I thought it would.

It’s a very light blogging day today.

Gary Price of SearchEngineWatch posts on Yahoo Images increasing their image database significantly:

“According to the company Yahoo! Images now contains more than 1.5 billion image files. This is the second publicly announced size increase to Yahoo Images in about 4 months. In October, Yahoo announced that their database had passed the one billion images mark. Earlier this month, Google announced that their image database contained more than 1.1 billion images. Let’s see if Google makes another move soon. This is beginning to remind me of the jockeying that took place with web index size counts a few years ago.”

The third annual Emetrics Summit Web Analytics Conference is scheduled for June 1, 2, 3 in Santa Barbara and June 8, 9, 10 in London. “The Emetrics Summit is a working session. Several presentations will help set the stage, but the participants will set the agenda. It is a gathering of thought leaders designed for interaction and discovery, not for lecturing and note taking.”

The Web Analytics Association: “The WAA unites and fosters the interests of industry practitioners, vendors, consultants and educators who use, sell, install, implement, consult, teach or train in the field of web analytics.” More at ClickZ also covered by SERoundtable.com

vnunet.com reports that the majority of the top 100 largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange are “invisible” to search engines. The article is based on research conducted by The Search Works.

A similar study is made each year in the U.S. by OneUpWeb on the Fortune 100.

Improvements have been made since previous year’s reports in both cases, but many large corporations still apply search engine optimization as a tactica on the departmental level. Companies that implement an overall SEO strategy across all web properties can realize tremendous results.

With an increasing number of “SEO rockstars” getting hired by companies, corporate SEO is on the rise.

Tags: SEO, FTSE, Fortune, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Blog

The acquisition of About.com from the New York Times has prompted some speculation regarding the cost justification and the real reasons for the move.

Jay Rosen at PressThink makes some interesting observations about how About.com’s search engine optimization skills and visibility could bring ” second life of content” to the information published by the NYT. The permanence of content published on the web extends the possible readership (and advertising revenue) beyond the initial subscriber base.

John Battelle provides some insight into why the New York Times wanted About.com and the role “search – and the long tail – plays in the deal”. About.com provides a platform that is search engine friendly, allowing NYT to get into the search engine game and further capitalize on advertising opportunities offered through natural search engine rankings.

Some bloggers are unhappy with Google’s new AutoLink feature in the Times Online

Filed under: Tags: google, amazon, blog, autolink, toolbar

AdWeek announced yesterday that the New York times has signed an agreement with About.com parent, Primedia for $410 million in cash.

This could be a nice move for NYT as it will significantly increase ad space to sell. Adding About.com would make the NYT online properties the 12th largest on the web.

Tags: About.com, New York Times, search engine

Dan Thies, of SEO Research Labs has started a new SEO blog at sitepoint appropriately called, Key Words. Here’s one of the first posts: SEO Showdown: Real Results vs. the Straw Man where he rants on optimized press releases and questionable top ranking claims. Good luck to you Dan!

Tags: SEO blog, search engine, marketing

Barry at Search Engine Roundtable posts on Ask Jeeves and how busy they’ve been lately with the Bloglines acquisition, running TV ads, the Ask Jeeves Blog, etc. He also notes that Ask.com is now only showing 3 sponsored ads rather than 10.

One of the reasons I have not been using Ask.com that much is because of the ads. Seeing the SERT post prompted me to take Ask Jeeves for another sping and I have to say, it’s pretty cool. Check it out.

Tech News on ZDNet reports that an updated version of the MyDoom worm has been detected. MyDoom searches an infected computer for email addresses and then searches the Internet looking for more. Most of the queries are going to Google but other search engines including Lycos, Yahoo and Altavista are also being targeted.

Fortunately, updated virus definitions should keep most computers safe.

InsideGoogle provides a good overview of the most recent update to the Google Toolbar for Internet Exlporer.

New features include a mapping, translation and spell check.

Tags: Google, Toolbar

As of yesterday, Firefox has had 25 million downloads in 99 days. Pretty impressive.

Tags: Firefox, browser