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April 18, 2007
In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for April 18, 2007:
If you’ve got a verified site listed in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can now speed up the process of having content from that site removed from the Google index. In addition, Google has made it much easier to request the removal of other types of content, including: content from sites you don’t own, personal information, and content that shouldn’t appear with SafeSearch enabled. Looks like Google is reaching out to users for help maintaining their index a lot more than they used to. I guess that shouldn’t come as surprise. When you try to index the entire world, it’s going to eventually get hard to manage alone.
Although we use Nielsen for our Search Engine Report Card, it’s always interesting to see what other tracking services have to say about search usage. According to comScore, Yahoo was the only search engine to loose market share in March. And who gained the most? Not surprisingly… Microsoft.
Billboards that say things like “The Algorithm Constantly Finds Jesus” are designed to raise consumer awareness about search engine algorithms, says Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone. The thinking goes that the more people are aware of how an algorithm plays into the results one gets from a search engine, the more likely folks are to use Ask.com… because of its “different” algorithm. It’s hard to argue the point that the algorithm is important. But I don’t care how many billboards you up with odd, cryptic phrases on them: the majority of the population does not and will not care about “the algorithm”. Two-thirds of them probably don’t even know what “algorithm” means. They’re much more interested in the results they get… not the technicalities of how it works.
Yahoo and PayPal have joined forces to thwart Google’s efforts to promote Google Checkout within the Google SERPs. In much the same way that merchants using Google Checkout will see little blue shopping cart icons by their ads and search listings, so too will PayPal merchants see a blue cart icon by their ads and listings in Yahoo. First of all… this is an obvious copy-cat tactic. The icons are almost identical. That being said, I think it’s a great idea for both PayPal and Yahoo. A lot more websites accept PayPal so Yahoo users are more likely to see the icon than Google users looking for Checkout merchants. Two problems exist, though: First of all, fewer people are using Yahoo… so that means less overall exposure. And there’s also likely to be some confusion as people search Yahoo and see an icon that means PayPal and then switch to Google and see an almost identical icon that means Google Checkout. Hopefully the big, hideous icons that Google’s been using lately will help minimize that confusion. [More information from Yahoo]
Today was definitely an announcement laden day for Google! The Webmaster Central team has improved the anchor text report that shows you how other people are linking to you. The improvements include: 1) more results, 2) variations of each phrase, 3) expansion of sites that have the report, 4) reporting of most common individual words, 5) more individual word results. My favorite part of the updated report is the ability to see the variations of anchor text phrases. Clicking a small arrow next to each phrase will expand a list of all variations, including minute differences like slashes, periods, etc. Overall… some nice additions.
TechCrunch and GigaOM have both reported that StumbleUpon has signed on the line and agreed to be acquired by eBay for somewhere between $45 - $50 million. The folks at StumbleUpon told Search Engine Land that these were only rumors… nothing more. But as SEL pointed out… they could be bound by a non-disclosure agreement that would bar them from talking about the acquisition just yet. I normally try to avoid rumors and unconfirmed news. But I’m a big fan of SU and eBay… so I want to stay on top of this. Supposedly, AOL and Google were both in talks to snatch up StumbleUpon also. But Google has released a StumbleUpon-like addition for the Google Toolbar today. Maybe Mountain View is upset that they got out-done by eBay… so they’re going to just compete with StumbleUpon instead? It’s like a soap opera without the bad acting and over-dramatic facial expressions! Today was certainly a busy day for Google. Presentation software… updates to Spreadsheets… new reports… new toolbar buttons… customized recommendations… new ways to remove content. I guess that’s all easy to do when you employ an army of well-fed PhDs… Mid-week is here and we’re sailing on. Until tomorrow… have a great night!
Comments:
1 Comment posted on "Headlines of Note for April 18, 2007"
Alan Liew on April 19th, 2007 at 7:07 am #
Interesting update on Internet marketing Industry. It seems that Google, Yahoo and eBay have always in fierce competition and in my opinion Google always win. Post a comment
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