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: Search Engine Marketing BlogGoogle’s Flash Indexing Disaster
On July 1st, Google announced that, using technology provided by Adobe, it had enhanced the Google Search Engine to index the text embedded within Flash movies. What followed was bad advice from Google, second-guessing by web developers, and finally a few straight answers.
Write For SitePoint And Win The Adobe CS3 Web Premium Suite
We’ve extended the deadline for this competition by two weeks.
You asked for more competitions, so here’s another one!
We’re giving away two copies of Adobe CS3 Web Premium (kindly donated by Adobe) to the authors of the best articles about Adobe Flex and AIR submitted over the next four weeks.
That’s right — you could WIN a copy of the ultimate graphics package for web developers, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, just by submitting an article about Flex or AIR. Worth USD $1,599, the package includes the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver and a host of other tools that form the industry benchmark for creating web graphics.
How To Win
- Write an article for publication on sitepoint.com about Adobe Flex or AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). We’re mostly looking for tutorials (either standalone or multi-part series). The article(s) must be original and must not be already published online elsewhere. We’re interested everything from beginner articles to intermediate and advanced topics. Also note that we’re looking for quality content (first-time authors might want to run their article past a friend or colleague before submitting).
- Submit the article before Sunday May 4th May …
Ask.com: We’ve Got All The Answers
After my recent post about Ask.com’s recent layoffs and change in strategic direction, I had an interesting chat to Nicholas Graham, spokesperson for Ask.com. Graham clarified a few details amid plenty of speculation that Ask.com would be retiring its search functionality entirely.
“AP ran a story that suggested we were retiring our search technology — a story that just wasn’t true, and one that they in fact retracted.”
True or not, it certainly fueled the rumor mill, and combined with the recent layoffs, has placed a big question mark over whether Ask.com’s new strategy is a good one — a predicament that has had Graham putting out fires ever since.
“The fact is that we have a very loyal user base — in fact, our research reveals that our core users, which happen to be primarily female, use Ask.com to search for three types of information: reference, health, and entertainment. What’s interesting is that these users in fact use Ask.com three times more than any other search engine,” commented Graham.
“We are definitely still innovating. We still plan on being a great search engine — the best, in fact, for users who are seeking answers. In fact, we’re hiring for …
Kiss Your Ask.com Goodbye
SearchEngineLand’s Barry Schwartz has a good writeup on the news that Ask.com has fired 8% of its staff, and is planning on changing the strategy behind its search engine, to instead focus on its female user base.
Ask.com is being refocused to build … an engine that answers questions tailored to women searching on health and entertainment.
As others have justifiably asked, what’s the big deal? In the days of Ask Jeeves, the combination of being able to type wordy questions and have them answered by a cute illustrated butler was a nice novelty and all, but have they ever been a serious competitor to Google?
SitePoint’s own John Conde sums up why competition for Google is vital:
Less competitors in search means less reasons for the current players to innovate. If Google provides Ask.com with its search results, which is what is expected, and MS snaps up Yahoo, then there are only two players left in search. And with how poor of a showing Yahoo and MSN have made against Google thus far a monopoly is very possible as well as a slowdown in innovation.
Good news for Ask’s core users, bad news for search …
Changes to PageRank?
It seems that Google has recently changed their PageRank algorithm. A number of sites have experienced a significant drop in PageRank as a result.
- Boing Boing: Was 9, now 7.
- Engadget: Was 7, now 5.
- Forbes.com: Was 7, now 5.
- New Scientist: Was 7, now 5.
Early reports suggest that sites which sell or exchange links are most affected. However sites that don’t fall into this category have also experienced a drop in PageRank.
This is a potentially devastating change for sites that rely heavily on search traffic. Post here if this affects you, or if you have any further insight.
Yahoo! Search Marketing Plays catch-up to AdWords
Yahoo! Search Marketing is finally catching up to AdWords and has launched new features (and highlighted old ones) to enable advertisers to exercise more control over where their ad dollars are going.
Among them:
Blocked Domains
Now you can specify websites in our partner distribution network where you don’t want your ads to appear.
Blocked Continents
Yahoo! automatically excludes traffic from continents other than North America. If global traffic is important to your business, you can opt into this traffic.
Both are steps in the right direction, though the blocked domains feature would be even more useful if it enabled advertisers to block ads from appearing on entire categories of webpages (such as domain name parking pages), a feature that is also badly lacking in AdWords.
Likewise, the blocked continent feature would be a lot more useful if Yahoo! allowed country-by-country targeting like Google does. Right now if you want to reach into Western Europe (Germany, UK, Switzerland, Sweden, Netherlands, etc.) you’re also forced to pay for traffic from Eastern Europe where the revenue-per-click is likely to be much lower.
I applaud the step in the right direction, but even more needs to be done for Yahoo! to catch-up to Google AdWords.
MSN’s Keyword Forecasting Tool
MSN adCenter has released a cool keyword forecasting tool.
Type in one or more keywords and you’ll get a breakdown as to the number of searches over the past year, and the forecasted number of searches for the next few months. It’s a great way to do more accurate projections on your traffic and sales volume for the near future.
As well, MSN will provide you with data about the demographics of the people who are searching for that particular keyword, namely age and gender.
No MSN adCenter account is required to use the tool.
Page Strength Analysis Tool
SEOMoz.org has developed a fantastic tool that calculates something they call “Page Strength” which can be used in to gauge the importance and visibility of any Website or Webpage.
I think it’s a great tool for any budding entrepreneur or marketer to have, as the Page Strength score is probably a much more accurate reflection of a Websites importance than Alexa Rank or Google PageRank alone.
Page Strength is based on a number of factors:
- Links pointing to the URL & domain
- Position in Google for the first four words of the title tag
- Age of the Domain
- Links from .edu and .gov domains
- Age of the Domain Name
- Links from Wikipedia, del.icio.us, DMOZ.org
- Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, and more
Give Page Strength a try on your own Website, or the next time you’re looking to acquire through the SitePoint MarketPlace.
Stop MSN From Displaying your DMOZ Descriptions
Both Google & MSN have an annoying habit of grabbing your site description from the DMOZ directory, rather than using what you have in your Meta Description tag.
MSN has finally provided Webmasters with an option to override the default behaviour.
What we did was introduce a new option at the page level - a robots meta tag – that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet. This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file. Source: MSN Blog
The new META tag for your webpages, if you don’t want your sites DMOZ description showing up on MSN Search results pages is:
meta NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”
This is a great way to potentially enhance the clickthrough ratio of your search listings on the MSN Search engine, especially if your DMOZ site description is poorly written or not representative of what you offer.
SEM Kit 2006 Progress Report
Since I lost my best friend and business partner in December, I haven’t been the most productive man in SEO… but I am back at it, and thought readers might like to know what I’ve been up to.
First, the 2006 edition (update) of the SitePoint Search Engine Marketing Kit is well underway, and will probably be published towards the end of this year, with an upgrade option available to those smart enough to already have the first edition.
The 2006 edition will of course reflect some of the changes that have taken place in the past year, highlighted by movement in the pay-per-click marketplace, unpaid inclusion (Google Site Maps), and link building. We’re adding a separate chapter on link building, new interviews, and another new chapter with an end-to-end case study.
What will we do in 2007? Assuming that SitePoint doesn’t fire me for missing 3 deadlines already on this project, we’ll probably have plenty more to talk about.
Besides writing, I have been very busy with my online training and coaching programs. I’ve already completed one link building workshop this year, and the second is about halfway complete. I love to teach.
If any readers would like …
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