Online Marketing Blog

ScrappyGoo via Google Blogscoped - Lets you search Google News and generate a unique RSS feed of your results.

Tags: Google News RSS, ScrappyGoo

Search Engine Spam Workshop via dirson - Reps from Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search, Ask.com and IBM will discuss topics ranging from TrustRank to SpamRank. Post links to some very interesting reading.

Web Spam Taxonomy, by the same researchers as ‘TrustRank’
An Analysis of Factors Used in Search Engine Ranking
Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust
Pagerank Increase under Different Collusion Topologies
Cloaking and Redirection: A Preliminary Study
Optimal Link Bombs are Uncoordinated
Blocking Blog Spam with Language Model Disagreement
SpamRank — Fully Automatic Link Spam Detection

To be held in Japan at WWW2005

Tag: Search Engine Spam

Google’s Blogger.com now offers a feature called Blogger Mobile that allows you to create and update a blog with photos and text from your mobile phone, PDA, etc. More details on the Google Blog

Tags: Blogger Mobile, Moblogging, Google

I just read an article on Wired about Zabasearch. It’s pretty much a comprehensive public records search engine that draws from over 29 thousand public databases.

One the one hand, it’s useful for those rare times when you have to recall where you’ve lived in the past 10 years or if you need to do a background check on a prospective employee.

On the other hand, it makes information easily available that you might not have wanted others to see. An example from the Wired article brought up scenarios involving stalkers and abusive domestic situations, etc.

These folks are doing some great work for non-profits. Check them out:

The Taproot Foundation is a volunteer organization that builds teams of marketing and creative services professionals, human resources professionals, and information technology professionals to work on projects for local nonprofits. Taproot let’s you “give what you know” so that you can make the strongest impact on your local community while networking and growing professionally.

Yahoo is apparently developing an audio search engine which is to be launched in a few months.

“The specialty engine will let people search on an artist’s name, for example, and retrieve all the available songs from other music services, as well as album reviews and band information from Yahoo Music.” via CNET News.com

Sounds like good news for Yahoo as they look for more ways to generate ad sales revenue.

Tag: Yahoo Audio Search

Maybe a little off topic, but very interesting. Apple has announced Bonjour, formerly called Rendezvous, for Windows.

“With Bonjour for Windows, you can easily network your Windows computer to an existing network or create instant networks of multiple devices without any additional network configuration.”

You can get more information and download Bonjour from Apple’s site.

Tags: apple, bonjour, network, rendezvous

The Google blog switched to a blogspot address today. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Everything is being redirected and they’ve added a blogroll. Interestingly, Google switched to the blogspot.com url but there are no blogspot.com blogs in the blogroll.
(I think I set a new record for using “blog” in a sentence).

Tag: Google Blog

Yahoo is taking Yahoo video out of beta and also announced alliances with CBS News, MTV, Reuters and others today.

Earlier this week, Google announced partnerships with the Discovery Channel and CNN and adding 14 new channels.

Why does Yahoo seem to be playing catchup with Google on new feature/service announcements lately?

Broadband acceptance is driving the push towards video search. The question is, how to monetize it?

More coverage at SearchEngineJournal, News.com and BetaNews

Tags: Video Search, Yahoo Video, Google Video

Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends posted recently about a recent survey conducted by HP. Some interesting findings include:

“Ten percent of small business owners in a recent study reported that they have included blogs in their marketing plans. And 16% plan to invest in blogs over the next 2 to 3 years.”

Which is pretty interesting considering less than half of all businesses have web sites. Additional comments from Anita on Blogs and SEO:

“SEO firms also figure in this mix. As the number of business blogs grows, it becomes harder to stand out. Search engine optimization (SEO) for blogs will become important just as it is for websites.”

Google launched Google Web Accelerator today. It’s an add-on to Internet Explorer or Firefox on a PC and supposedly speeds up the rendering time of web pages. It even comes with a built in timer to tell you how much time you’ve saved over all. It shaves just seconds or even milliseconds off rendering time, but it adds up after a while.

How does Google Web Accelerator work? According to Google…

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

Barry from Search Engine Roundtable is covering the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto. Be sure to visit his SEO blog for posts about the sessions he’s attending.

So far he’s posted on the Organic Listings Forum and Cleaning Up Spam & Other Messes.

Update: Here’s a link to a summary of all the SES Toronto sessions Barry attended

Tags: SEO, SES, search engine optimization