Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

From the announcement email to Overture advertisers:
“As previously announced, Overture and parent company Yahoo! have combined their search marketing products under a new name ‚Äì Yahoo! Search Marketing. The products and services previously brought to you by Overture are now available through the Yahoo! Search Marketing Manage My Accounts page.”

NEWS.com reports that new YSM services include: Travel Submit which enables advertisers to submit offers to Yahoo’s travel Web site, Marketing Console tracks advertising campaigns and Search Optimizer enhances ad campaign performance.

Basically, Yahoo has combined all of their advertising services into one tool – and that does make it easier to manage. Yahoo is doing a lot of things “right” these days: Bloomberg reports Yahoo may be reporting a 60 percent profit surge in the first quarter.

As posted earlier, Marketing Sherpa is working on the next issue of their SEO Firm Buyer’s Guide. This will be the 4th edition for the search engine optimization company guide and the first edition of the new PPC Buyer’s Guide.

Anne Holland, founder and publisher of Marketing Sherpa was kind enough to answer a few questions about the upcoming guides.

Do you have an anticipated date when the report will be available?
The two Buyer’s Guides will be available at the end of April — our graphic design and proofing team are already cranking on them. Check SherpaStore.com for details in a couple of weeks.

The beta version of the new Yahoo News was made live today. I had previously posted on the Sneak Peek at the new Yahoo News a few weeks ago listing several of the upcoming features.

Yahoo News beta selects news from a smaller universe of media properties than Google News but does allow users to add their own news from any site or blog that offers RSS.

The new design allows you to quickly tab through different sources and the Y!Q feature has also been incorporated. The Y!Q feature highlights a particular term and places an icon next to it to let you know alternative sources of information regarding that word or phrase are available. Clicking on the the icon displays a Y!Q popup window with links to related search results.

Here are various search engine industry news tidbits for the day:

Firefox continues to gain on MSIE

Search Engine Watch forums have reorganized. A few changes of interest to me includes a new forum called “Blogs, RSS & XML Feeds” plus a new sub-forum under “Vertical Markets & Specialty Search” called “News Search”. Thanks Barry.

buzztracker plots the geographic location of items published on Google News – via InsideGoogle

Comparison shopping search engine Become.com officially launches.

List of top paying AdSense Keywords – via Eric Baillargeon

Del.icio.us Gets VC Funding – via SearchViews

Get images to appear in “regular” Google search results. WMW

Friday was the last day to complete the survey for consideration of inclusion in the 4th Marketing Sherpa Buyer’s Guide to search marketing firms. The newest version of the report has been named the “SEO & PPC Buyer’s Guide”. There were many more detailed questions asked this year plus there were two surveys instead of one. Options to take either the SEO or PPC or both were provided.

Competition for good Search Marketing firms is heating up and this guide could provide the additional information some companies may need for selecting a vendor.

I have asked for the availability date and cost for this newest edition and will post when Marketing Sherpa gets back to me.

“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.

SearchEngineWatch points to a research paper, Web Spam Taxonomy, by Zolta Gyongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina from the Stanford Database Group that will be presented at the WWW2005 Conference next month.

Unfortunately, this paper gives blanket definitions of spam to most SEO activities and offers, at times, a misguided understanding of what most SEOs do for clients.

“The activity of some SEOs benefits the whole web community, as they help authors create well-structured, high-quality pages. However, most SEOs engage in practices that we call spamming.”

Is that all they think SEO’s can do legitimately? “Create well-structured, high quality pages”? Interestingly enough, some of the techniques in this paper could serve as sort of a black hat seo cookbook. If nothing else, it’s a very interesting read.

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.