B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.
“Yahoo Inc. is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and resources to the nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation” – via ExtermeTech
The Yahoo blog posts a guest entry by Jimmy Wales president of the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia and Yahoo! Google also provides support to Wikipedia by donating bandwidth and servers.
When searching Wikipedia, I was pleasantly surprised to see someone add this SEO blog to the Search Engine Optimization page. Cool.
Yahoo News now offers custom RSS feeds. If you use Yahoo News alerts now you can easily switch to custom RSS feeds and read them in My Yahoo! or any other RSS reader.
“Yahoo! News is now offering the following feeds in the RSS format. The feeds are free of charge to use for individuals and non-profit organizations for non-commercial use. Attribution (included in each feed) is required.”
The feeds are keyword-based and very easy to set up. Via makeyougohmm.com and Google BlogScoped.
Custom RSS feeds from search results are available via MSN Search. (look at the bottom left of your search results). You can also get them from a search on MSNBC Newsbot. MSN also has it’s own web based RSS Reader.
The blogging service from Microsoft called MSN Spaces has come out of beta. Storage has been increased from 10 MB to 30 plus they’ve added more themes. 4.5 million Spaces accounts have been created so far.
More info on the launch of Spaces and Messenger 7.0 via [email protected]
Speaking of MSN, Rand has posted an excellent interview with the MSN Search team on his blog.
For the future, MSN Search team mentions: “Local, blogs, mobile, API?¢¬Ä¬ôs and RSS are all important next areas of development for us and anyone serious about Search.”
The inteview covers topics including:
– creation of MSN search
– community input
– search and hardware
– crawling
– corpus size
– competing against Google
– quality testing and spam
– working for MSN search
– the people behind MSN search
– non-search technologies
– future developments
Here are a few search engine related spoof sites you might like. There must be a more complete collection of these out there somewhere, if you know of one, feel free to comment.
UnderGoos – “Maximise your comfort and user experience with UnderGoos. Our staff aren’t shy, even Sergey’s been trying out both the mens and ladies ranges. Google has spotted a chance to bring our unique innovation to yet another underserved market.”
Sixf00! 660 – Parody of Yahoo! 360
“You need an invitation in order to use Sixfoo! 660, but you’re probably not special enough. Sign up for the feta waiting list, then cry from the corner of the playground while the kewl kids enjoy the the foursquare court. Why not round up all your 12-sided dices and go beg for a Gmail Account, sucky baby?”
Google has updated AdSense to allow real time reporting. This should be very useful for high volume publishers. Unfortunately, this blog is not there – yet.
MediaPost notes with recent AdWords updates you will be able “to compare the conversion rates of ads in different channels, including Google’s search rival, Overture.” Now that’s pretty interesting and potentially very threatening to Overture and MSN’s new PPC program. It could really provide advertisers with a direct comparison of ad network performance.
SEOBook also notes the launch of Google AdWords Budget Optimizer. A way to further automate AdWords PPC bid management. He also posts some interesting comments on how useful such a tool would actually be. We’ll try it out and post comments in a month or so.
“We’re going to start taking video submissions from people” in the next few days, Page told a crowd at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association show here. Later, in response to a reporter’s question, he called the move an “experiment in video blogging.” From CNET News
Google Video allows you to search the closed-captioned text of a selected number of regional programs. Search results show still-shots captured at various intervals with text excerpts.
It will be interesting to see what Google will do with submitted videos and who they’ll take them from.
Other video search tools I’ve used include Yahoo Video and Blinkx TV search which both differ from Google Video in that they show links to full videos rather than still shots.
Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review reports on his visit to Yahoo to sit in on a production meeting related to the redesign of Yahoo News which is due to launch in public beta later this month. (screenshot)
New features include:
IAC and Ask Jeeves are not officially commenting yet, but plenty of media and blogs are in regard to a $2 billion stock deal for IAC to acquire Ask Jeeves.
New York Times: “IAC/Interactive Corp., the Internet company headed by Barry Diller, is close to an agreement to acquire Ask Jeeves Inc., the nation’s fourth-largest search engine company.”
Wall Street Journal:
“Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp last night was near a deal to purchase the fifth-largest Web-search service, Ask Jeeves Inc., for around $2 billion in stock, according to people familiar with the matter, marking an aggressive move by the electronic-commerce company into the Internet’s most competitive arena.”
Yahoo is planning on offering a blog service called Yahoo 360 that will be more like MSN Spaces than Google’s Blogger.com. Beta testing starts March 29 and will offer initial users the option of inviting friends to use the service, similar to how Google promoted Gmail.
Users will be able to draw upon content from other Yahoo services as well as share posts and photos of their own. Yahoo 360 is part blogging and part social networking.
“It’s really about keeping connected to people you know,” said Julie Herendeen, vice president for network services at Yahoo. “Yahoo 360 allows consumers to conveniently connect with the people they care about by creating and sharing blogs, photos and other content across Yahoo.”
Three critical components that should be considered for any blog marketing campaign include: content, frequency and distribution.
Content must be interesting and useful to your readers. Develop your unique voice and don’t be afraid to post things others will not agree to.
Frequency of posts are important as there is a direct correlation to blog popularity and the number of times it’s updated. When we started posting 2-4 times per day, our SEO blog traffic increased by 50% the first week and has continued to improve since.
Distribution of your blog is important. A common issue I hear from people new to blogs and RSS is where to find them. What’s great about blog marketing is that you can promote a blog and your RSS/Atom feed within the blogoshpere via linking in/out, through directories and blog/feed search engines. You can also promote your blog through traditional directories, search engines and web site linking. The opportunity for blog exposure is much greater than a regular web site alone.
I noticed today that Google is now checking for automated web site submissions on the Google add URL form. When submitting a site Google has added an optional field to enter in a string of characters that dynamically displays on each visit to the page in order to distinguish from manual and automated submissions.
This is fairly new as the Google cache of that page from yesterday does not show the extra form.
Recently it was also reported that Google search engine ranking checkers were being presented with the same type of form.
So is Google tightening up the general access to some of it’s services? If Google is getting hit pretty hard with a large number of automated queries, it makes sense. I am curious where else this feature will show up on Google.
Yahoo! Search blog has posted that the Yahoo! Toolbar for IE will now detect RSS and Atom feeds just like the Firefox version does.
To make this work, you need to have the v5.6 of the Yahoo! toolbar installed. Then you need to make sure the My Yahoo option is selected under your personal options and that you’re logged in to Yahoo.
Once that’s all done visit a site that has the proper autodiscovery tag for a RSS or Atom feed in place, a blue button will appear in your toolbar. Click on that to add the feed to your My Yahoo! reader.
I appreciate the added feature, but I enjoy the freedom of adding feeds without logging in myself – as in Firefox + Sage.
