Search Results
August 31, 2007
It’s no big secret in the business world that’s not always what you know that lands you a job. Sometimes (probably more often than we’d like) it’s who you know that matters. But unless you’ve got connections at your dream company, getting to know someone with influence isn’t always easy. Yahoo! thinks it might have the solution to the problem with a new social network called Kickstart. Don’t get your hopes up just yet - Kickstart is still in research/development mode. But the product is currently being tested in a very limited capacity while Yahoo! gathers information and feedback from the early testers. Kickstart works by attempting to connect college students to their favorite potential employers. The kicker (no pun intended) is that Kickstart makes these connections through alumni of the student’s school who also work at the company in question. So let’s say you’re curerntly attending IMMU (that’s Internet Marketing Monitor University). You’d really like a job at Apple… but you don’t know anyone there to get your foot in the door with. Using Kickstart, you could potentially link up with IMMU alumni who are currently working at Apple. I guess the idea is that the college becomes the common bond that ties folks together. But Kickstart also works like a traditional social network in that it shows you friends that both the college student and alumni have in common as well as hobbies, interests, etc. Combined together that could potentially be a match made in heaven… that could land you a dream job. Yahoo! says there’s no guarantee that the service will ever see the mass public light of day. The company has tried several times to get a strong foothold in the social networking scene. But so far nothing has worked out. Could Kickstart be the… well… kickstart… that Yahoo! needs?
August 17, 2007
Now how did Friday go and sneak up on me again? Am I the only one whose week just flew by? At any rate, here’s another round-up of interesting and informative news from around the web. Oh yes… it’s Link Love Friday! Think MySpace is the social networking king? Well… it might be (unfortunately). But not in a place that historically knows a little more than we in The States do about kings - The U.K. According to reports from comScore, Bebo - not MySpace - is the most visited social network in The United Kingdom. Now if you look at the numbers, we’re talking about a 500 person difference here… so it’s not a huge lead. But it just goes to show that, despite what we like to think, the U.S. doesn’t always have the best taste (come on people… MySpace is just awful). Speaking of social things, Valleywag is reporting that Fark founder Drew Curtis has accused Darrell Phillips - a new media manager for a Fox News station in Memphis, Tennessee - of attempted hacking. Oh yes… hacking. According to Curtis, IPs matching Phillips’ have been up to all kinds of bizarre behavior, including sending bogus emails with trojans attached in an attempt to gain employee-level access to the system. I’m not sure why anyone would go to such trouble to get into Fark. VW has some theories, though. comScore also published a list of the top 50 web properties rankings for July. Burger King had an amazing 774% increase in unique visitors during the month. Are they running a Whopper sale or something?? Oh wait… no… it’s The Simpson’s Movie. So nothing really to do with actual Burger King food. I guess that goes to show that partnerships really can have a big impact on your traffic! Facebook, arguably one of the hottest properties on the net, must be thrilled by the news that TripAdvisor just spent $3 million on one of the social network’s apps - Where I’ve Been. TripAdvisor is denying the report. I’d deny it, too. $3 million for one Facebook app? All together now… let’s say this together… “RIP OFF”. American Airlines is making the news rounds today on reports that the company has filed suit against Google. American Airlines problem is that Google doesn’t stop other people from bidding on their trademarked keywords. Hopefully they’re upset about words other than “American” and “Airlines”… because those are such unique keywords, ya know? Anyone else notice that suing Google has become a new international past time? Since we’re on the topic of Google, I found a Hitwise report on the popularity of YouTube interesting as well. According to their data, there’s a strong negative correlation between searches for funny videos and YouTube. As searches for YouTube go up, searches for funny videos goes down. What I don’t understand, though, is why people aren’t just going to YouTube. I mean… if you know the name of the site… why not just go to it? Surely they can’t be forgetting the URL… And yet another week comes to an end. I can’t remember the last time 5 days seemed to fly by so quickly! Until Monday… have a great weekend, folks…
August 16, 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 August 16, 2007:
Be Topical. Be Natural. Ease of Use. Encourage Distribution. Good advice for all the linkbaiters out there! I especially think folks should pay attention to #2: Be Natural: “Good linkbait shouldn’t look like link bait. The link-getting motivation should be subdued to a point where it’s not apparent at all. You don’t want to look as if you’re trying too hard for links.” Those are wise words that many a linkbaiter fails to grasp. If someone calls your linkbait out as such, it probably means you’re trying too hard. Linkbaity subjects are also much more likely to have long-term linkability if they naturally inspire people to point to them.
If you expect to see a huge jump in your search rank overnight - think again. Even though search engines are getting better at finding content quickly, it doesn’t mean they’re fully indexing, ranking, and processing that information at break-neck speed. For example, I made some big changes to a robots.txt file on one of my sites about 2 months ago. Google Webmaster Central told me that Google had accessed that robots file the next day. The affects on my Google rankings are just now starting to become apparent… and there’s still a ways to go. The best advice for long-term search optimization is patience. You should be able to see some affect within a couple of months. But the full benefit of optimization done today might not be realized for much, much longer. There’s no such thing as a quick-fix in SEO.
Speaking of robots.txt, Google has just announced some improvements to the way Webmaster Central handles the reporting of discovered robots files. In addition to more detailed explanations of how Google will handle your file, the new reporting feature also lets you know what other information has been parsed from robots.txt (such as sitemap notifications). The other big of robots-related Google news is the addition of REP (robots exclusion protocol) meta tag support. These meta tags make communicating with Googlebot about non-html files much easier… and they can be used at the page level! Robots.txt applies to entire domains… REP meta tags can be added to individual pages. More information and example implementations can be found at the Webmaster Central Blog.
Although the name of this post would imply something underhanded was being discussed, it’s not. In fact, I loved everything about this article except the title. The type of link buying being discussed here is the type of linkage that more people SHOULD be buying. Sure… free links are best. But when you do have to pay for them, this is the idea. The way I see it, links aren’t much different than advertising. And few people question the ethics of advertising as long as it’s relevant. Keep your link buys relevant, make sure they add value to the audiences of both sites, and go for it. How is that any different than, say… sponsored search results?
According to numbers from both Compete and comScore, USAToday’s readership has taken a fairly large hit since the hotly-debated revamp of the site into a social network. Remember back in March when the change was made? Matt called the USAToday remake “vandalism” and said he’d fire whoever made the decision to implement the social features. Even though it took longer than a week, I think he might have been on to something. However, despite these numbers, the debate continues. Donna Bogatin scoffs at TechCrunch’s analysis and argues that the social features really are adding a lot of value for users - just ask Digg how well social networking and news mix, she says. On the other hand, Lisa Barone of Bruce Clay says USAToday’s falling numbers are the “consequence” of ignoring their users. What does USAToday say? That everyone else’s data is wrong and their traffic is actually up since the revamp! What do you think? Have a great night, folks!
August 06, 2007
Filed Under (Search Engines) by Derick on 08-06-2007
Some have speculated for years that Google has some secret crush Wikipedia. The human-edited “encyclopedia” ranks well for just about any search term for which it has an entry. Since Wikipedia is so massively interlinked, a lot of folks say that the “good” Wikipedia pages pass along PageRank to the cruddy pages… and thus they all rank well. On Friday, Bill Tancer of Hitwise made an interesting point on the company’s blog: Wikipedia is extremely dependent on Google for it’s traffic. When Tancer graphed Google’s traffic to Wikipedia, and compared it to a graph of the encyclopedia’s overall traffic, the two were almost identical. On the same token, Wikipedia makes up a big portion of Google’s “content”. Only Mountain View’s own Image Search and social networking powerhouse MySpace get more clicks in Google. Now that Wikia, the company behind Wikipedia, has decided to take on the search engine industry, will things change? Google has made changes to the way it handles certain domains in the past (granted… none as big as Wikipedia - that I know of). Will Wikipedia suffer the same fate? Flickr is one of the Internet’s largest collections of images. But the Yahoo!-owned company doesn’t really appear in Google Image Search. An image search for “apple” in Google and Yahoo! (which does index Flickr) illustrates the differences. Windows Live Spaces, a Microsoft property, shows up in Google. But when was the last time you saw a Live Spaces site rank well for anything (which could simply be because there aren’t many valuable pages there). So it’s not unheard of for competitor’s content to show up in Google. But if Wikia really starts to compete with Google, will Wikipedia get the bump? It would affect both parties quite a bit. If Wikipedia begins to drive people to Wikia’s search engine, would it be worth the loss for Google? I don’t know. I’m just throwing the idea out there. What do you think?
August 01, 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 August 1, 2007:
According to Dan Crow, product manager for the crawl infrastructure group at Google, there isn’t enough bandwidth or electricity to allow the search company to spider and index the entire web. Therefore, he says, they have to be selective about what gets added. One of the best ways to make indexing your sites easier - and in theory permit more of them to be indexed - is to streamline and optimize the code used to create them. Crow says that a well-coded site is smaller, responds more quickly, and is less-confusing to Googlebot than a poorly coded site. But we knew this already, right? Matt has mentioned the importance of a well-coded site on a number of occasions. Have you been listening?
We all know that social networking is all the rage these days. But I’ve often wondered if we here in The West were the only ones swept up in it. I’ve not seen many international members on either MySpace or Facebook. But according to comScore, millions of international users have been jumping on the social networking bandwagon over the past year. And, interestingly, certain networks seem to lean toward certain regions: MySpace & Facebook in North America, Bebo in Europe, Orkut in Latin America and Asia, and Friendster in Asia. Why does that matter? Because if users in any of those regions are part of your target audience, you should be using those social networks for brand awareness and marketing! Until tomorrow… have a great night all…
July 24, 2007
Web Worker Daily has published a great article that deals with using social networking wondersite Facebook for professional purposes. Most of us probably think of Facebook as a place to connect with our friends and family more than anything. But contrary to popular belief, Facebook can serve a much broader purpose. Web Worker Daily’s list includes 12 ways that you can use Facebook in your professional life:
These are all good ideas. But some of them are more advice than really “ways” to use Facebook in your professional life. So I wanted to throw in a few of my own suggestions for ways that Facebook can be used, especially in the Internet marketing profession:
For the time being, Facebook is the new “it” property. You should be taking advantage of the site’s popularity now. The sooner you establish a presence, the better. Facebook offers an unprecedented way to network, connect with colleagues and customers, and research. What other ways of using Facebook professionally or for marketing purposes can you think of?
July 12, 2007
Danny Sullivan & Co. have launched a new social news / discussion forum / community site for the search engine following crowd called Sphinn:
I love the fact that users can add new “stories” in one of two ways: by submitting actual stories from other sites or by starting up a new, original discussion. So in a way… Sphinn is like a social news / forum hybrid that seems to integrate discussion topics right in with the submitted news stories. Nice! A calendar of events and user list for networking purposes round out the site’s launch-day features. Congrats on the launch, guys! Here’s to a great success… |
|
