Online Marketing Blog

Normally when related queries are suggested after doing a search on Google, they appear at the bottom of the search results page (SERP). I noticed this weekend Google is testing the display of other Google categories as well as related search queries above the right side column ads. (Outlined in red)

The example above shows a link to Google Products. However, other keyword queries generate links to other Google search products: Google News, Scholar, Blogs, Books, Video, etc. I am only able to create these results on Firefox using Google, not via MSIE or Opera browsers.

A few quick links of worthy happenings in the industry:

More MSM foolishness and incomplete reporting at Forbes, “Condemned to Google Hell“. Yeah, that’s right. On this one I am drinking the Google kool aid.

Over at Search Engine Watch, Greg Jarboe reports on a recent Hitwise report about emerging trends with online news in a SearchDay article, “A Perfect Storm Hitting News and Media“. The affect of video on news, Topix and local news as well as the non-effect of sites like Digg on news are revealed. Interestingly, a recent study by the Newspaper Association of America reported that the average daily circulation of 745 newspapers reporting data fell 2.1% for the six months ended March 31, compared with the year-earlier period. There are huge marketing opportunities with online news folks.

Google is always testing tweaks to their search results but today I noticed a very interesting feature that I think is called Google Categories. Below is a screen grab of SERPs for “dvd players”. “motorola cell phones” also triggered these results but things like “lawn care” and “art museums” did not. It’s obviously product focused.

Notice the bold headings on categories of search results including: Comparison Shopping, Reviews, Stores, References and Others. There’s also a link to turn this feature off at the top right, “Turn OFF Categories for these results”. There are other categories including Forums, News and Manufacturers.

The good people at Ask.com pinged me this morning that Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com announced support of autodiscovery for Sitemaps today.

WebProNews published an announcement about the search engines Google and Yahoo agreeing to work on a common sitemaps standard and the launch of sitemaps.org at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas last year.

The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. The updated Sitemap protocol has benefits for site publishers, the search engines as well as searchers. Ask.com is also supporting manual submissions of sitemaps via a ping url.

Is it an April Fool’s joke or the real thing that Google’s Matt Cutts blog has been hacked by Dark SEO team? Either way, there’s a ton of buzz about it already ranging from at Search Engine Land to several forums to Digg.

Danny Sullivan reported Matt’s site has been slow and that he’ll be offline until Monday so the hacked page will be up for a while. Interestingly, Matt’s blog and this blog are both hosted with the same company - at least from what I can tell from his DNS records.

Aaron Wall published a number of nifty custom buttons for Google Toolbar in the past and now that Google Toolbar 4 is out, he’s posted a very nice collection:  Google Toolbar SEO Buttons under categories such as:  Link reputation/popularity, domain age, on-page content analysis, competitive analysis, blog link search, official search engine blogs, a nice collection of SEO related blogs and a “how to create your own buttons” tutorial. Nice.

Yesterday when I was searching Google on my partner’s laptop, I noticed down the left side of the search results the tabs that are normally displayed horizontally on the home page: Images, Maps, News, Groups, Books, Froogle and More with the option of drilling down your search using those filters.

I was using Firefox and not logged in to Google but was able to replicate it several times on that machine. When I tried on my own laptop, it was a no-go.

Here’s a partial screenshot:

Here’s a link to a larger screen shot.

On Jeremy’s show tonight over at WebmasterRadio.FM, “Net Income”, he and Andrea interview Brian Axe, AdSense Product Manager. It’s a great show that starts out with quite a few clarifications of Google AdSense changes in terms of service ranging from not displaying images next to ads to the review and reinclusion process. Too many for me to list here, so be sure to listen to the full podcast.

A few notes from Jeremey:

• Google is not against arbitrageurs but rather respect it as a business model.
• Confirmation that not only is YouTube doing revenue sharing but it will be apart of AdSense.

Steve Rubel reports today that Wikipedia entries now appear in Google OneBox results. Just add “info” or “information” to your query and the first results will be from Wikipedia if there’s a match. Will an entry in Wikipedia be what a DMOZ entry used to be? Perhaps in more ways than one.

For a great resource on how to take advantage of marketing opportunities via Google OneBox, I recommend reading Brian Mark’s blog, The OneBoxer.

Dan Rosandich sent me this cartoon. Apparently he runs a service that you can use to automatically populate your blog or web site with cartoon images via RSS or JavaScript with a daily cartoon. They’re not all about search engines or SEO, but some bloggers might find it to be an interesting way to add content. More at Dan’s cartoons.

Fantomaster used to post SEO related cartoons and Chris Pirillo’s bLaugh offers a web 2.0 slant on their cartoons. Rand uses them in his PowerPoint presentations as well.

Google has a handy logo today in recognition of Marting Luther King Jr. Day and I was greeted by my 6 year old son singing a song about MLK this morning that I had not heard from him before!

There’s a bit of a meme going around regarding the potential use of Google Reader as an alternative to digg. The idea is to be able to view the the most popular shared feeds. Steve Mermelstein starts out with a post, “Google Reader Could be a Digg Killer” which caught the attention of prominent bloggers Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble with nice roundup by Jason Lee Miller from WebProNews.