Online Marketing Blog

Andy Atkins-Kr?ºger is covering the Search Engine Strategies conference in Paris this week and today quotes Francois Bourdoncle, CEO and founder of France-based search engine Exalead in the opening keynote of Search Engine Strategies Paris as saying . “We‚Äôre all helping to create the Google monster” and calls the major search engines the ‚ÄúWalmarts of the digital world.”
Bourdoncle also has thoughts about the Google, Yahoo MSN Sitemaps collaboration: “The sitemaps specification is not nice and open and it is not nice and closed‚Äù. He believes the initiative aims to close the door to new entrants to the market place.

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I hadn’t noticed this earlier, but there’s been a full exodus of Search Engine Watch correspondents over to Search Engine Land. It will be interesting to see what Incisive does to fill that gap.

I had no idea Michael Gray was a fan of cooking (I am too!) and he does a nice rundown of the Thanksgiving feast he prepared yesterday along with photos.

More wisdom from Todd Malicoat comes our way ala Cluetrain Manifesto in the form of “The Stunt Train SEO Marketing Manifesto“.¬† Right on the money Todd!

Google Integrating Blog Posts Into Search Results

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Manoj over at Web Analytics World blog has announced the release of a new eyetracking study by Enquiro that takes an in-depth look at interactions with Google, Yahoo! and MSN using eye tracking methodology. Many search marketers are familiar with Enquiro’s original eye tracking report on Google. (pdf)

The new Google/Yahoo/MSN whitepaper covers:

• How We Scan a Listing
• Semantic Mapping
• Information Scent
• Thin Slicing
• Banner Blindness
• Growth of Navigational Search
• Impact of Bolded Search Queries and Icons
• Perceived Relevancy
• Golden Section Theory
• Portal Entry Success
• Interactions with Top Sponsored

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Spotlight on Search - Interview with Google’s Adam Lasnik

One of the fun things about being involved with the search marketing industry is getting to meet really bright and interesting people. Whether they are long time SEO gurus, CEO’s of fast growing corporations or employees of the major search engines, this industry rarely disappoints with its variety of perspectives.

With the majority of search market share, most webmasters pay a significant amount of attention to Google. Google has done an increasingly good job of interacting with the webmaster community through the efforts of Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox as well as Adam Lasnik. After having the chance to talk to Adam, I thought he and his job sounded pretty interesting and he agreed to do a short interview.

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I just received an email from JotSpot, a wiki service provider we use. JotSpot was co founded by Joe Kraus, a name you might remember in search engine history as a founder of Excite.com

Here’s the email:

We’re writing to let you know that Google has acquired JotSpot. We believe this is great news for our users. More importantly, we want to reassure you that you’ll continue to have uninterrupted access to your account. Both Google and JotSpot are committed to supporting our customers, and we understand that users have invested a lot in our products. In the near-term, we’re focused on migrating JotSpot to Google’s systems and datacenters. We’ll work hard to make that move as seamless as possible so that customers won’t be inconvenienced.
Why is Google acquiring JotSpot?

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When I attend or speak at conferences, I always, like to visit the exhibit areas to see how they’re laid out, scope out which search marketing agencies are exhibiting and to visit friends from other companies and search engines. While checking out the Interactive exhibit hall here at DMA06, I noticed a few things:

There were hardly any search marketing agencies. Kevin Lee was there with Did-It and I believe I saw iCrossing. That was it. Apparently SEOInc had a booth in the other monstrous Exhibit hall that was made up of list brokers, direct mail companies,etc.

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An interesting email from the Google AdSense team came in early this am:

As our valued AdSense publisher we’d like to present you with a great opportunity to gain additional free traffic to your website through Google Base. Google Base is a place where content owners, like you, can upload information to Google. You describe and assign attributes to the information you submit and we use this meta-data to target search results to what users are looking for. In fact, based on your items’ relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.

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Yahoo gives a new weather report that they rolled out a search index update but not any more detail than that.

There’s a particular phrase that’s very competitive on Yahoo that I spot check every time an update is announced (286,000,000 search results) and we have 2 of our sites in the top ten for the phrase. With this most recent Yahoo update, we dropped from #1 to #3 and the second listing moved up to #5 which is fine, but Yahoo is completely ignoring our 301 redirects and showing the wrong domain names.

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Phillip Lessen points to a very handy tool from Google called searchmash that appears to be a test interface for Google search results providing text SERPS in the left and matching images on the right. Each search result offers a dropdown menu of options that are normally presented as text links plus options for how you want the link to open.
What’s fun is that you can drag and drop the search results, ie, reorder them.¬†¬† You can also pick from text/images or all images.

Looks like someone’s 20% project I guess.

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John Battelle has posted an excellent interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the subjects of webspam and human influences to search quality. Regarding “human contribitions” to search quality, for some reason, lately I’ve been wondering if Google will acquire or implement something like StumbleUpon?

In other Matt Cutts’ news, does he have an evil twin? via Barry at SEW

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Wow, Eight years! That’s an awful long time in internet time. I wonder how many PG SEO practitioners there are out there? By PG I mean, “pre-Google”.

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Some of our favorite Google people were in the media recently:

The Chicago Tribune did a huge piece on Google overall (hattip threadwatch) with a sidebar article “Meet Google’s Credibility Cop” on Matt Cutts.

I remember reading or hearing somewhere that Matt had worked for the NSA and this article mentions only that he interned with the Defense Department doing some programming.

The article opens up with language like, “hucksters, spammers and other charlatans” when making reference to manipulations to rank better on Google. Search marketing folks will know that means tactics that are to the extreme and not legit SEO, but I am not so sure everyday business Joe and Jane will see it that way. Actually, the article doesn’t mention search engine optimization at all.

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