Online Marketing Blog

Parent firm of Marketleap, Digital Impact has recieved a purchase offer from infoUSA at $2/share. Digital Impact’s board has not responded. Marketleap was acquired by Digital Impact in 2004. Via DMNews.com

This is just speculation, but is a Google blog search coming soon? I think so. The reason I think so is that, lately, a few of the blogs I follow are starting to disappear from Google’s main search results. URLs will still show but no titles or descriptions. Also Ask Jeeves just bought Bloglines and is in the process of building a world-class blog search. So, Google may be currently moving the blog results from the main search engine over to the blog search engine. I’m guess that in the next few weeks we may be seeing ‘blog’ as a search choice on Google.

Yahoo! Search blog has announced a beta version of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Firefox. Pretty much all the features found in the Yahoo! Toolbar for MSIE are there except for Anti-Spy, which is to be added.

From SearchGuild.com Via New York Times:
“Eileen Rodriguez, a Google spokeswoman, hardly quelled the speculation by explaining that the whole thing was really a learning opportunity for the company. Google “has become a domain name registrar to learn more about the Internet’s domain name system,” she said recently in an e-mail message. “While we have no plans to register domains at this time, we believe this information can help us increase the quality of our search results.”

Ask Jeeves announced Tuesday that it has bought privately held Bloglines, a site for searching millions of personal Web pages and aggregating news headlines. From CNET News.com

Jim Lanzone SVP, Search Properties at Ask Jeeves, posts on plans for Bloglines to include building a world-class blog search.

Letter to Bloglines Subscribers from Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines - “We view this as a huge step forward for Bloglines, and a chance to achieve our mission of making RSS news reading and blogging a part of everyone’s internet experience.”

Tags: Ask Jeeves, Bloglines, SEO Blog

Here are several recent search engine marketing articles that are worthy of posting:

“What if I were to tell you the majority of online purchases from search advertising happen after a searcher has conducted at least 12 nonconverting searches?” - Nonconverting Keywords and the Search Continuum - ClickZ

SearchEngineWatch Blog notes a New York Times article announcing that About.com is for sale.

“Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and The New York Times are bidding to purchase the site. Final bids must be received by today. According to The Times, the asking price is $350 million to $500 million.”

Tags: About.com, Google, Yahoo, AOL

Google recently launched a beta version of Google Maps:

“Google Maps is an online service that allows users in the U.S. to find location information, navigate through maps, and get directions quickly and easily.”

Includes features for viewing maps, local search within the displayed map area and driving directions. For example, I entered in my city/state and Google Maps quickly showed a map of the area. Then I searched on “hardware store” and the map was redrawn with icons and a list of locations to the right. Each results shows options for the web address, additional matches and directions to or from the location.

A few tidbits regarding the trend of blog, RSS and search marketing:

News that Ask buys Bloglines. This news has gained quite a bit of coverage in the blogosphere, but very little in traditional news (yet). Formal announcement is to occur today or Tuesday.

I first read about Bloglines being purchased by Ask Jeeves on John Battelle’s Searchblog over the w/e but did not have time to post. One must have a real life outside the online world.

Excellent observations on RSS, Blogs and search from Traffick on Bloglines and the Future of Blogs, RSS and Search. “The “Ask-iquisition” of Bloglines will accelerate search engine interest in blogs and RSS. More big deals like this will follow.”

Many search engine optimization firms still tout guarantees of top ten rankings. A specific ranking or position guarantee on organic search engine listings is not practical for a couple of reasons:

1. Search Engines are in Control - SEO firms do not have control over how search engines algorithmically rank pages. We can identify the strong influencers and use what has worked in the past to achieve top rankings, but if a Search Engine decides to change the way it ranks pages, goes out of business, gets acquired, or adds/changes their source of search results data, there is really not much a SEO firm can do about that. However, a good SEO will know about these things before they happen and have a plan of attack to minimize traffic and ranking effects, if any, to the client site.

Very nice post by SEO Book, I mean Search Engine eBook, ah how about Search Marketing Guide? about Latent Semantic Indexing. The idea is related to what I’ve seen described as “contextual relavency” where a search engine (like Google) ranks a document in part based on the related concepts in the page as a whole and compares them to other related documents in the index. What this means for your SEO efforts is explained in more detail in the post, but one take-away is to be sure you mix up your anchor text as well as keyword useage on-page.

According to Government Computer News, Google Inc. will be geo-enabling its search engine with the recent acquisition of Keyhole, a digital mapping company. Keyhole’s technology lets a user enter an address, “fly” over a 3-D image of it, zoom and tilt, measure distances and find things around it.

“The Google engine will be part of the second-generation Geospatial One-Stop e-government site, said John Calkins, a technical consultant with contractor ESRI of Redlands, Calif. Calkins said the Google spatial engine will handle ‚Äúup to 8 billion records‚Äù of metadata. The spatial version of the Google Search Appliance is not yet commercially available.”