Microsoft

October 2, 2008

Will Microsoft SearchPerks Pique Searcher Interest?

A few months ago Lisa predicted that the Live Search cashback program was destined to fail. Well, now Microsoft's started its newest rewards program, Live Search SearchPerks.

It's not the first attempt by a search engine to woo users and build trust by appealing to the purse strings. Over at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan rounded up a great list of incentive-based search programs that Microsoft is running or has run, along with the now-defunct rewards programs from some of the less-utilized engines like iWon and Blingo. Anyone else see a pattern? Stupid question.

Okay, but seriously, let me take off my trendy skeptic hat for a moment. While my gut tells me that incentive-based programs are ruses to buy my allegiance, I actually just signed up for SearchPerks. If you haven't yet read about how the program works, you basically download this little counter that lives on your IE6 toolbar, and the counter keeps track of how many searches you do with Live Search. Every search you do on Live Search gets you a ticket and you can earn up to 25 tickets per day. The deal ends April of next year and at that point you can cash out your tickets for prizes or hand them off to charity. Just for signing up you get 500 tickets. For perspective, 250 tickets get you 100 frequent flyer miles, while 525 tickets are good for five music downloads. I'll have that racked up by the end of my first day.

It turns out that I'm not the only one willing to sell off a time-share to my soul. Or maybe just a one-month lease. Truly, there's no long-term value to bribing customers if the service isn't up to par. But since signing up for SearchPerks, I've been using Live Search exclusively and the results I'm receiving are relevant and, in many cases, include exactly what I was looking for. Keep that up and they may just get some converts.

That's not to say it's been easy. From a user perspective, the SearchPerks program has a few things going against it. First, there's my habit of searching through my toolbar, and I've yet to change the default to Live Search. This is mostly because I'm not convinced that Live will be my long-term search solution. Seeing the little "G" in the corner of my browser reminds me that if my new relationship doesn't work out, I'll be taken back with open arms. Then there's the fact that for searches to count toward tickets, the search has to be done through IE6. Here I am with five extra windows up than I'd usually have on my screen, since there's no tabs in IE6 and I'm not about to stop using Firefox. It's making me dizzy. And then, privacy advocates may not like that the SearchPerks software records the number of searches you do, the types of searches, the number of ads you click on and any toolbars installed.

Of course, if they expand the apparel prize category to include shoes and bags, it'll be totally worth it.

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 10/ 2/08 at 4:35 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Live Search, Microsoft

August 28, 2008

SEO Headlines

What Are You Withholding From Your SEO

Aaron Wall had a super awesome article over on Search Engine Land today that asked Are You Giving Your SEO Enough Information To Succeed? Basically, Aaron details the pitfalls that occur when you just tell your SEO that your site is sick and don't offer up any other information that would help with a diagnosis.

If you're going to hire someone to handle your site's search engine optimization or even if you're just bringing them on as a consultant, you have to be completely straightforward about what your issues are (er, your site's issues. You can save your issues for your spouse.). Otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time as you all keep fumbling around in the dark, never getting closer to solving the problem at hand. There's no use bringing in an SEO consultant to give you advice on making your Web site more spiderable or search engine-friendly if you're going to muddle with your robots.txt and accidentally block the entire site or buy links and get yourself penalized. The only way for search engine optimization to be successful is if everyone knows what's going on and everyone's on the same page.

I don't think clients even do it to be deceitful; they just don't realize. Like in the example Aaron gave, it doesn't even occur to them that that reason their site has tanked in the engines is because they failed to upgrade their WordPress and got hacked. It's not up to you to be able to diagnose that on your own. But you absolutely have to hand over all the information you have to your SEO so that he or she can help figure out what's going on. That's why you're paying them.

As a general rule of thumb: Never lie to people who are there to help. Not even in terms of SEO, just don't do it ever.

Sometimes First Isn't All It's Cracked up To Be

Larry Chase starts an interesting discussion over at Web Digest For Marketers saying that Being #1 in Search Results Isn't Everything It's Cracked Up to Be as searchers don't always stick with the first result when searching in both the organic and paid space.

It's really just one of those things you want to keep in mind because he's right. And it makes total sense. For example, say you're interested in buying a new pair of shiny New Balances (I may be in the market...). You go to Google, type in [new balance] and are presented with this:

Chances are you may do some research on NewBalance.com and some of the other retailers - you'll spend some time looking at the different types of shoes, the colors, look at some 360 views, maybe check out the accessories. And then, when you're on Famous Footwear and finally decide that you liked the show you saw up in the first result, you're going to buy right there. You're not going to hit the back button and start redoing your search.

Just something to keep in mind as you kill yourself trying to rank number one for your keywords. Sometimes, especially if you're a retailer, ranking a little lower can actually play to your advantage. This type of search engine positioning is extremely valuable for businesses.

Interestingly enough, Bruce recorded an interview with Ralph Wilson last week while at SES and they talked about why soon rankings won't be a metric at all. It's worth a watch.

Help Microsoft Fix What's Broken

If you were at the How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Department To Get Stuff Done session last week in San Jose, you may remember that a few digs were taken at Microsoft for not being so SEO-friendly.

Nathan Buggia is asking SEOs for feedback on how to make Microsoft's development offerings SEO-friendly by default. If you've been frustrated with Microsoft in the past, now you're chance to get some stuff improved. Speak up.

Fun Finds

Stephan Miller alerts me to the launch of Bloghology, a new print magazine totally devoted to blogging. It's old media covering new media. Clever. I like it.

While we're talking about blogging I'll also mention that I'll (very excitedly) be attending BlogWorldExpo on Sept. 20-21. The show was an absolute blast last year and I can't wait to head back. So if you're not registered, I'd get on that. I'll see you there.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/28/08 at 4:46 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Live Search, Microsoft, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

August 6, 2008

Live Search Updates Webmaster Tools

Lisa's soaking up the sun in Ensenada by now - lucky girl. On the up side, in Lisa's absence, we've all gotten to enjoy the guest blog posts by some of the brightest and most impressive minds in search. And there's more to come! Thanks, ladies!

It turns out that not everyone's gotten to enjoy leisure time lately, as the Live Search Webmaster Center team has been hard at work preparing to roll out the first major update to their Webmaster Tools since the November debut. And it appears that the new features address anticipated improvements to the Webmaster Tools.

The first thing that caught my eye is that the little "(beta)" has disappeared!

Webmaster Center this morning:

Webmaster Center following this afternoon's update:

That's right. Live Search's Webmaster Center is out of beta. When I talked to Program Manager Jeremiah Andrick, he said that Webmaster Center's release from beta is just the beginning of their efforts to support the Web publishing community.

Jeremiah explained, "We have staffed a team of folks that are committed to providing more data about your site to improve crawling and developing a strong community around these tools to help answer your questions. We rely on the webmaster and publisher industry to provide us feedback on where we can improve and will continue to add new features and improvements in the future."

So what exactly are these nifty new features?

Crawl Issues: Webmasters and SEOs will be pleased to see the report of issues Live Search found when crawling and indexing your site. The four issue types reported on are 404 errors, URLs blocked by Robots Exclusion Protocol, long dynamic URLs, and unsupported content-types. According to Jeremiah:

"By addressing these issues, webmaster can improve how Live Search sees them... We expect that a webmaster will use this report to identify these problems on their site and fix the issue with the broken link, or create a 301 redirect the URL to a more appropriate location."

Backlinks: The new incarnation of Webmaster Tools offers an enhanced look at inbound links from external sites. Along with the increased quantity of reported inlinks - up to 1,000 can be downloaded - the improved backlinks tool is capable of filtering results by a number of factors. The new filter functionality allows sorting of backlinks from specific sites, sub-domains, or sub-folders, as well as backlinks from specified top level domains.

More actionable data: The other cool new features included in today's update are intended to help make the data gleaned from the tools more actionable. Understanding that webmasters and SEOs will often need to import the data into offline programs such as Excel in order to analyze it, this update makes possible just such an action. The download option makes the first 1,000 results available in a CSV file that can be opened with Excel and other database or custom reporting tools. Advanced filtering, as demonstrated in my explanation of the improved backlinks feature, lets webmasters filter results by up to two sub-domains or two sub-folders, allowing for easier access to the desired gems without having to excavate entire mountain ranges. Both the download and filter options have been enabled on all reports, both old and new.

From the look of it, this update has gone a long way to improving the resource that is Live Search's Webmaster Tools. Interested in seeing the update yourself? I don't blame you. Give it a spin and let us know what you think!

Posted by Virginia Nussey on 08/ 6/08 at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Live Search, Microsoft

July 9, 2008

SEO Headlines

Google's New Keyword Research Tool

Our PPC guru Nick Guastella was all aflutter this morning over the news that Google has added search counts to its keyword research tool, thereby turning on another light for SEOs and search marketers. According to Google:

When you use the Keyword Tool to search for relevant keywords to include in your keyword list, you'll be able to see the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network. These approximate numbers are intended to provide better insight into keywords' monthly and average search volumes than previously provided by the tool.

The new data will help search marketers with keyword choices, spotting trends, budget planning and will help them outline their account structure. I supposed props go to Google for being so aggressive about pushing out new tools to give search marketers more data, more numbers and more insight into optimizing their campaigns. I'm going to do my best to avoid the conspiracy theories and be excited about the new data. Nick seemed to be.

For more details, Google has an extensive guide to its Keyword Tool. I don't think many are still mourning the loss of Overturn's keyword research tool.

But Srsly, WTH is Lively?

Yesterday afternoon word started to spread about Google's new virtual world nicknamed Lively. It's a browser-based virtual environment that will tie in to social networks like Facebook, OpenSocial, and MySpace. Okay. The whole think smells of Orkut. It's just another social networking attempt that Google's audience never asked for, doesn't want, and will likely never use (or at least not here in the States). I'm not impressed; in fact, I'm confused as to why they even bothered.

It feels like not even Google knows what it wants to do here. As GigaOm notes, in a recent Virtual World News article Google's Head of 3D Operations (I love that a 3D division even exists) Mel Guymon makes it sound like they're only in the virtual space because it seems like that's the place to be. That's a great way to induce Product Fail. The obvious assumption would be that Google developed Lively as a way to (in time) get users to generate content that they can then place ads on. Lively has integration with Google products like YouTube and Picasa so that may be another way to generate more clicks and ads, but that's not nearly enough to make it exciting.

It seems that if you're going to release something like this, it darn well better be superior to its nearest competitor. In this case, though the missions are different, that's Second Life. And Lively's not even on the same wavelength as SL. People in virtual worlds demand complete control of their surroundings and freedom to explore. Lively fails to offer that. So where's the incentive to switch? There isn't one.

Google, I know you're all excited about another chance at monetizing something, but next time try and do a better job of masking it behind something that's maybe useful.

adCenter Makes Impressive Strides Against Y!SM

Barry reports on the buzz that Microsoft's adCenter seems to be on the rise much to Yahoo's dismay, with advertisers reporting more spend on adCenter than with Yahoo Search Marketing. Over at Search Engine Watch one member noted that adCenter as outperformed Yahoo in both conversions and CPL over the last month. At Sphinn, Kate Morris argues the same. Barry says the "tide is turning". Is he right?

I certainly hope so. I'm not a fan of much of what Microsoft puts out there, but adCenter has long been touted as the superior platform despite its pea-sized traffic. Maybe with search marketers starting to see rewards, they'll be more likely to increase their spend over there. But if they do, it doesn't curb adCenter's major hurdle - the fact that the audience isn't there. And the audience isn't there because the Live search engine is....nowhere near where it should be. Maybe the folks in Redmond could stop bullying Yahoo and get on that. They just may have something here.

Fun Finds

I'm a huge fan of Patrick Winfield's recent article The 10 Best Ways to Find the Perfect Image for Your Blog Post. Some seriously good stuff in there.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 07/ 9/08 at 4:29 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, Yahoo

June 16, 2008

SEO Weekend Update

Hello. Do you have coffee? I'll give you a cat for a cup of coffee. Coffee? No? Just some SEO news then? Fine.

What's Your Blog Comment Policy?

Scott Allen had a really good post with Thoughts on Blog Comments, Moderation, and the Conversation where he talks about the part comments play in the overall conversation on blogs. There's been some debate about blog comments lately, both internally and abroad, and what right the blog author has to moderate or even delete them.

Personally, I think it's completely the blog author's job to set the rules and make sure that everyone in the community sticks to them. Around here I've had to do quite a bit more moderating and editing than in the past. Some subjects have hit closer to home or excited a far more passionate response and sometimes people let they emotions get the better of them. When someone leaves a lengthy comment that is nothing more than a personal attack on someone else, it's not going to be posted. If it can be edited and salvaged, it will be. But if all you've contributed is a 1,000 word essay on why you don't like X and why X would be better off locked in a closet with no food or water, well, you're not giving me much to work with. Take a nap and then come back.

Blog comments should enhance the quality of the conversation. They should offer alternative points, present debate, enter in some humor, etc. They should keep the integrity of the blog intact. If not, then the owner of that blog has the responsibility to moderate it and help bring the conversation back on topic. Or at least those are the rules we play by. What about you? Do you publish everything that users submit? How fearful are you to edit the thoughts of others?

Yes, XML Sitemaps Are Important To SEO

Barry Schwartz asks if Google Sitemaps are important to search engine optimization. We also talked about the issue back in February in our SEO Newsletter article entitled Building an XML Sitemap.

Barry points us to the Google Groups thread where Googler JohnMu explains that it's generally worth the time to set up a complete XML Sitemap, listing the kinds of data that Google is most interested in.

Back in February, Bruce Clay Senior SEO Analyst Maryann Robbins discussed many of the same features and explained that building an XML Sitemap was absolutely essential for search engine optimization purposes. They not only give Google a complete list of the pages you want indexed, but they also give you the opportunity to provide supplemental information about those pages. They help with canonical issues, tell the search engines how often the page changes, when the page was last modified, how important the page is to your Web site, etc.

So if you're asking whether or not XML Sitemaps are important for search engine optimization, the answer is "absolutely" and "yes".

Microsoft's Plans For Search

Now that Yahoo is no longer an option, General Manager of Microsoft's Search Business Group Brad Goldberg sat down with Robert Scoble to talk about what they're looking to do next. Topics discussed in the interview include Microsoft's plans for mobile, how they plan to compete with Google, the quality of the Live engine, and whether a Mahalo-type strategy could help them gain market share.

If you have half an hour or so, it's worth a listen.

Fun Finds

The Times of London reports that the average teenager's iPod has 800 illegal music tracks. Hee, ouch. Those damn kids are nothing more than a horde of pirates!

Everyone's favorite job search engine Indeed.com has just launched job analytics for employers. Now if only we could get them to launch a coffee delivery program for employees.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/16/08 at 4:24 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Blogging, Live Search, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

June 4, 2008

Search Friendly Development

Good morning, Friends. It's time for Day 2 and I'm coming to you live from the brand new Developer Track. The Developer Track is awesome because it comes complete with a fancy waterfront view. I'd also mention the yummy bagel I'm eating but I think Michael VanDeMar is going to come and kick me if I do. He's over my bagel stories.

Vanessa Fox will moderate as speakers Nathan Buggia (Microsoft), Maile Ohye (Google) and Sharad Verma (Yahoo) get us started.

Up first is Nathan Buggia. He says he rewrote his entire presentation last night based on what people were talking about on Day 1.

Microsoft is working on lots of big, hard problems. Stuff like:

• Affiliate tracking
• Session management
• Rich Internet application
• Duplicate content
• Geo-location
• Understanding analytics
• Redirection
• Error Management

Advanced search engine optimization is analytics. That's what differentiates it from regular search engine optimization. It means you're at a larger company with more resources (um, not necessarily). Implement things in a logical order. See what the impact is on your customers and the engines and decide if that's the right thing to go forward with. Do not implement something because you heard someone on a panel say it was a good idea. PageRank sculpting is a good example of that. Everything on the Web is an opportunity cost.

Nathan says to watch out for complexity. If you build cloaking or situational redirects into your Web site, you can add a lot of complexity to your site. It becomes hard to notice if you have problems on your site because stuff is hidden from even you. You want the simplest architecture you can have. Microsoft says cloaking isn't all bad, but it's never the first, second or third solution they recommend.

All Web sites have the same first problems. The first problem is accessibility. That's where people should start. Can a crawler get to your Web site? Are they hitting 404s? Do you use Flash or Silverlight and are they monopolizing the user experience? Take a look at canonicalization. Are you dividing all your PageRank and reputation?

Search engines are always changing. Someone can come up on the stage and claim they have the big new tactic for search engine optimization and then that may change in a year. What is consistent are the Webmaster Guidelines. Those are things that in spirit all the search engines agree with. If you go to Google's Webmaster Guidelines and adhere to the spirit of them, then you're working with the search engines instead of against them.

Nathan gives us an example and uses Nike.com. Nike is a brilliant company. There are few companies that can do the type of branding that they did with Just Do It.

When you go to Nike.com you see the Flash loading. Then you select language, region, etc. Then you get another loading screen because they're going to play a full minute video. It takes eight seconds to get to that video. Maybe people don't have eight seconds. Maybe they only have one second. The second run experience is 3 seconds because of the cookie Nike puts on your computer. The cookie resets every day. If you are blind or ADHD, you have a really bad experience on that site.

The site also isn't great for search. He shows us the HTML behind the page. There's no Title tag. There's nothing. It's just a Flash application. Basically they're cloaking. The site is also really complicated. Nike has over 2 million pages on their Web site and they're cloaking for a lot of them. He shows what the Nike SERP description was for a few days after their cloaking broke. It was a user error.

Every investment you make is another investment that you can't make. If you're investing all in cloaking, there are other people out there NOT investing in those things. If you type in [Lebron James shoes], Nike doesn't come up.

Alternate Implementation

Throw your rich object at the top of the page and then use JavaScript at the bottom to detect what the div does. (If I mangled that, please feel free to correct me in the comments. As awesome as Nathan is, I don't speak tech geek.)

Advanced search engine optimization is not spam.
Search engine optimization does equal good Web design.
Design for your customers, be smart about robots and you'll enjoy long-lasting success.

Sharad Verma is up.

Sharad says he loves his job. This is an opportunity to serve his customers. When he's not working he loves to travel. Last week he was in Machu Picchu, Peru. He's giving us a bit of a history lesson and telling us how he took trains and buses on his journey. I'm not sure where this I going but it will tie together soon. Oh, I get it. The moral of the story is that Machu Picchu is accessible and easily discovered. I see what he did there.

As a site owner you're serving both your users and robots. You need to design your site so you're not alienating either of them. There are three cranks behind the box - crawling, indexing and ranking. You have control over all three, but more control over crawling.

How do Spiders Crawl Your Web site?

They start with the URL, download the Web page, extract links from the Web page and then follow more links. Sometimes they find invisible links or sometimes they see links but decide not to crawl the content. That could be because the links are excluded in your robots.txt or because they're duplicate links.

Search engines find your contact via the organic inclusion from crawling. All you have to do as a site owner is put up your site, get links, and let the crawlers in. They'll do the magic. If you're not satisfied with what they're crawling, then you can supplement that with feeds.

Roadblocks of Organic Crawl

Search engines do not understand JavaScript. They're starting to understand it but they're far away from being able to full crawl it. He recommends turning off your JavaScript and seeing if you can navigate your Web site. Is all the content reachable?

Flash: Make sure your site can be read by a robot. If you're using Flash, make sure you're offering up alternative navigation.

Dynamic URLs: Difficult to read, lead to duplicate content, waste crawl bandwidth, split the link juice and are less likely to be crawled and indexed.

Best Practices:

• Create user friendly, human readable URLs
• 301 redirect dynamic URLs to static versions
• Limit the number of parameters
• Rewrite dynamic URLs through Yahoo! Site Explorer

He asks how many people use Site Explorer and their Dynamic URL Feature. Log in and authenticate your Web site. It allows you to remove parameters from URLs.

Duplicate Content

Consequences of duplicate content: Less effective crawl, less likely to attract links from duplicate pages.
Solutions to duplicate content: 301 duplicate content to the canonical version, disallow duplicate content in Robots.txt

Other Best Practices:

• Flatten your folder structure
• Redirect old pages to the corresponding new pages with 301/302
• Use keywords in URLs
• Use sub-domains ONLY when appropriate
• Remove the file extension from the URL if you can
• Consistently use canonical URLS for internal linking
• Promote your critical content close to the home page

You can also get your content included through feed based crawling. You can provide feeds through their Sitemaps Protocol to tell the crawler were to find all the pages on your site, especially your deep content. Sharad recommends using all the Meta data supported by Sitemaps Protocol.

Do not exclude your CSS content in the Robots Exclusion Protocol because the engines want to see the layout of your page.

Search engines want your content. Break down those accessibility barriers and let them do their job.

Maile Ohye is up last.

Google wants to help users create better sites. If you have better sites, we all have a better Internet. Aw. She's going to tell us how to enhance your site at every stage of the pipeline. Maile talks like an infomercial.

Crawlable Architecture

Consider progressive enhancement. This means you don't just begin with Flash. You start with static HTML and then add the "fancy bonuses" like Flash and AJAX later. Then the fancy stuff becomes a complement to your Web site instead of your entire site.

She looks at a page/site that's rich in media with HTML content and navigation - the Dramatic Chipmunk video on YouTube. The video is in Flash, but there's descriptive content on the page (title, description, user generated content in the comments) and HTML navigation.

Consider sIFR for Flash

JavaScript detects if Flash is in installed.
With No Flash, it displays the regular text. With Flash on, you get the Flash.

If you do that the text must match the content viewed by enabled users. It must be accessible to screen readers and search engines.

Consider Hijax for AjAX

Format JavaScript with a static URL as well as a JavaScript function. She gives us a long URL and says that the search engines often ignore fragment (#f00=32) but respect parameter (?foo=32). I'm hoping that makes sense without you having to see the long URL.

Google Webmaster Central

Webmaster Tools: They give crawl errors if you verify your site. In crawl errors, be sure that what you see is what you expect. They'll show URLs blocked by robots.txt, make sure that's what you want. They'll also tell you about time out errors and unreachable links. Use it to verify your link structure and that all your links are findable.

Promote your quality content. Set preferred domain to www or non-www. You don't want to run two versions of your Web site. [As a note, this doesn't always fix the problem. Be consistent in your linking and don't rely on Google to do your work for you.--Susan]

To reduce duplicate content, keep URLs as clean as possible, internally link to your preferred version and store visitor information in cookies then 301 to canonical version.

Use a cookie to set the affiliate ID and trackingID values.

Proper Use of Response Codes

Use 301s for permanent redirects.
Signals search engines to transfer the properties like link popularity to the target URL. This applies to situations like moving a site to a new domain and modifying the URL structure.

Anatomy of a Search Result

Create a unique, informative title. It acts as informative signal of the URLs contents to a search engine and user. You don't want your title to say "Untitled". She talks about how Webmaster Tool can help you locate Title tag issues.

Snippets: Provide the user more content about each search results. The quality of your snippet can impact your click-through.

Influence snippets with Meta Description. Meta Descriptions can be utilized by Google in search results. Meta keywords are of low priority.

Final thoughts from Maile:

• Verify Crawl errors as expected
• Creative descriptive titles, consider adding useful meta descriptions
• Submit site maps for your canonical URL
• View Webmaster Central blog posts

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/08 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Design, Google, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, liveblog, smxseattle08

June 3, 2008

Organic Track: Bot Herding

Back from lunch and Rand Fishkin is moderating a star studded panel. We have Adam Audette (AudettaMedia), Hamlet Batista (Nemedia S.A.), Nathan Buggia (Live Search Webmaster Center), Priyank Garg (Yahoo Search), Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service), Evan Roseman (Google) and Stephan Spencer (Netconcepts).

[Ooo, we're rocking the Tears for Fears. It's pretty sweet. SMX always pulls out the good stuff. I'm really loving the Organic room this time around. The first row is literally two feet from the stage. I could totally throw my mini bottle of water and hit Adam Audette square in the face. Not that I would. I really like Adam. Maybe I'll take out Rand instead?

Holy Jesus. I almost just kicked over the big projector that the speakers watch. Blogger Fail.]

Rand gets this whole show going. He says he's moderating. He's wearing a tie. I don't think I've ever seen Rand wear a tie. Up first is Michael Gray.

Michael says that when you first buy a house you're poor. Over time you make more money and can afford to air condition your house. But no matter how much money you have you'll never air condition your mail box because you have a better use for your money.

Similarly, you have a Web site. You don't have a lot of links. You don't have a lot of Page Rank. You're not going to send that PR to your Contact page because it's not a good use of your resources. You want to send your PR to the pages that make the most sense for you. You want to send it to the places that will give you the most sales and the most leads.

PageRank and link equity, how much do you have: Many Web sites, especially smaller or new Web sites, don't have a lot of PR. They have to use and maximize what little they have and direct it to the right places that make the most difference.

Deciding What to Sculpt Out

Who wants to rank for privacy policy, terms of use or contact us?

Locations: Unless you are multi-location business, put your address in the footer and sculpt out the Locations page.

Company Bios: Unless you are involved in reputation management scandal, sculpt them out.

Site-wide footer links, advertising stats, rates and legal pages.

How to Sculpt:

• Nofollow: Quick and easy, but may be a signal to search engines that an SEO or advanced webmaster is involved.
• JavaScript: Old school, relies on client side technology, currently bots don't crawl it but this may change in the future.
• Form pages, jump pages, redirect pages - More complex to implement and maintain. Search engines currently don't follow them but that may change

Be Consistent. If you're going to nofollow something, do it with all of your links and then do it in your robots.txt. Don't block them one way and then allow them in another. This will account for outside links and any spider or search engine quirks. He says that he's seen most benefits on mid-level sites where they sculpted out blocks of 20-50 non-conversion based pages.

Do it now or wait for a rainy day? He says do it now. If you have any critical or serious issues this can take a backseat. Otherwise, unless you have a large or very complex site, PageRank sculpting is a 1-2 day project at the most for any CMS or template based site. It's easier to get it right now than to get back and fix after you launch.

Adam Audette is up to give us 8 arguments against sculpting PageRank with nofollow. He used to do it but he's now starting to slow it down. They use it far, far less.

More Control: Have a mechanism at the link level to control spider behavior is good. However, we don't know enough. We don't know how much PR we have on a domain. We don't know how much we have on a page or how much a link takes off a page. We're attempting to control the flow of internal PR but we don't know how much we have. We don't know how much it fluctuates. It's imprecise. It's like using a precise surgical tool while blindfolded.

It's a Distraction: There are a lot of things we can do to make our sites better. Matt Cutts has said that sculpting with nofollow is a second order effect. It can also mask other issues - focus of a page, keyword dilution, user experience, etc.

Management Headaches: When you have a large site you may have many departments working on a page. What rules are in place? It's confusing. Why are 5 links nofollow'd on this page? How do you preserve it?

It's a Band-Aid: People are using it to try and address a symptom they're seeing on a site. They're not taking care of the problem.

Where's the User?: Think of a site with tons of PageRank feeding that into mediocre places, thereby raising those pages in the SERPs. Are we giving more power to high authority domains?

Open to Abuse: Every tool is open to abuse, but you can think of all kinds of creative ways to use nofollow. When will nofollow start being abused and how will the search engines react? Matt Cutts says it's okay, but there are good and bad ways to use a technique. He may look at your site and think you're using it in a bad way.

Too Focused on Search Engines: Advanced search engine optimization has always been about what's right for your users and what's right for search engines. Too much use of the nofollow puts too much focus on search (specifically on Google). Does this help your users? Would you do this if the search engines didn't exist?

There's No Standard: There are multiple definitions for nofollow and each engine may treat it differently. Nofollow started for blog comment spam. Then it went to paid links. Now it's to control your internal PR. What's it going to be next? It moves too much.

[Rand shares a detail but says you can't ask him how he knows it. He says 5 percent of pages on the Web currently have a nofollow'd link on them and 85+ percent are using it internally.]

Stephan Spencer is up.

Duplicate content is rampant on blogs. Herd bots to permalink URLs and lead in everywhere else. (Archives by date, category pages, tag pages, home page, etc). You can use optional excerpts to mitigate that a bit. [Whatever that means.] It requires you to revise your Main Index Template theme file.

Stephan says to include a signature link at bottom of your post/article. Link to original article/post permalink.

On ecommerce sites, duplicate content is rampant because of manufacturer-provided product descriptions, inconsistent order of query string parameters, guided navigation, pagination within categories, tracking parameters, etc. Selectively append tracking codes for humans with white hat cloaking or use JavaScript to append the codes.

Pagination not only creates many pages that share the same keyword theme, but it also creates very large categories with product listings not getting crawled. Thus lowered product page indexation. Do you herd bots through keyword-rich subcategory links or View All links or both? How to display numbered links? You have to test because your mileage will vary.

PageRank Leakage: If you're using Robots.txt Disallow, you're probably leaking PageRank. Robots.txt Disallow and Meta Roberts Noindex both accumulate and pass PageRank.

Stephan talks about the magic of regular expressions/pattern matching and I'm not even going to pretend that I followed any of it.

Some expressions I did manage to catch:

Mod_rewrite specifics
Proxy page using P flat
QSA flag is for when you don't want query string parameters dropped.
L flag saves you on server processing

Got a huge pile of rewrites? Use rewritemap

He talks about conditional redirects. It's way black hat. I'm covering my eyes.

Error Pages: Drop them out of the index by returning a 200 status code instead so that the spiders follow the links. Then include a Meta robots no-index so the error page itself doesn't get indexed. Or do a 301 redirect to something valuable and dynamically include a small error notice.

Hamlet Batista is up to talk about white hat cloaking.

Good vs. Bad cloaking is all about your intention. Always weigh the risks versus the rewards of cloaking. Ask permission - or just don't call it cloaking. Don't call it cloaking. Call it IP Delivery.

When is it practical to cloak?

The main idea of cloaking is about making more of your content accessible to the search engines. Parts of that can be because you're using a search unfriendly CMS, if you have content behind forms or if you're a rich media site. It can be that you're a membership site (free vs. paid). He's also going to talk about using it for site structure improvements, geolocation/IP delivery, and multivariate testing.

Practical Scenario 1: Proprietary Web site management systems that are not search-engine friendly.

Regular users see URLs with many dynamic parameters, but the search engines see friendly URLs. Your users will see URLs with session IDs, but with simple cloaking the search engines see URLs without session IDs. Your users will see URLs with canonicalization issues. The search engines see URLs with consistent naming convention. Your users see missing Titles and Meta Descriptions. The search engines see automatically generated tiles and Meta Descriptions.

Practical Scenario 2: Sites built in Flash, Silverlight or any other rich media technology.

With cloaking, you can give users a completely Flash site and the search engines will see a text representation of the graphical, motion and audio elements.

Practical Scenario 3: Membership sites.

Search users see a snippet of premium content on the SERPs and when they land on the site they are faced with a reg form. Members see the same content the search engine spiders see.

Practical Scenario 4: Sites requiring massive site structure changes to improve index penetration.

Regular users follow the structure designed for ease of navigation. Search engine robots follow a link structure designed for ease of crawling and deeper index penetration of the most important content.

Practical Scenario 5: Geotargeting

Practical Scenario 6: Split testing organic search landing pages.

How do we cloak? In order to cloak you have to ID the robot and then deliver the content. You can do that via a few methods:

• Robot detection by HTTP cookie test.
• Robot detection by IP address
• Robot detection by double DNS check
• Robot detection by visitor behavior

Hamlet runs out of time and Rand nearly yanks him off the stage. Poor Hamlet. He didn't get to finish his presentation, but Rand was just doing this job.

Priyank Garg is up.

Robot Exclusion Protocol: Allows publishers to tell Robots access permissions for their content.

Robots.txt: Introduced in '90s. Defacto standard followed by all major search engines. Allow site level directives for access to content.

META Tags: Page level tags. Allow finer controls.

What is the standard? Does everyone work the same? Priyank says the engines are working together to make standards across all engines. The engines all support page level tags like HTML Meta, noindex, nofollow, nosnipper, no archive, noopd.

They want to have all the engines come out with this at the same time so there is no confusion.

In the Q&A, Evan Roseman says they don't view uses of nofollow as some type of "flag" for SEOs. They're standard of nofollow has not changed over the years. People have simply begun using it in new ways.

Nathan Buggia says a nofollow'd link is viewed as any other link. MSN Live does not support nofollow. [Update: Nathan retracts his statement later on, much to the disappointment of bloggers everywhere.]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 3:00 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, SEM Events, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, liveblog, smxseattle08

SMX Advanced Opening Keynote: Kevin Johnson - Microsoft

Hey kids, it's time to kick off another SMX. This time we not only have bagels and orange juice but there are power outlets in the front row. It's like blogger heaven! Getting us started will be Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Platform & Services Division.

Before Kevin starts, Danny is going to give us a quick talk. He calls it the "hangover break". He's wearing crazy-colored socks and thanking people. Danny says he got Microsoft a little gift - Yahoo is waiting out back. Hee! Danny's now making fun of the bloggers. He calls out me and Tamar and Marty. Okay, time for the good stuff.

Kevin says that Microsoft is focused on four core businesses - desktop, enterprise business, the consumer electronics business and the online business.

At the center of online is the concept of the advertising platform. You think of search and display and the end-to-end platform. When you look at the ad platform, it's about scale economics: The more inventory you get, the better it's able to deliver. It's a software problem. Microsoft believes they can bring value to the ad area because it's about software and that's something Microsoft knows about. It's about what ads to serve, how to improve the buy/sell process, creating software that provides workflow and manages massive amounts of data. It's involves a significant investment in capital. When you look at the industry, they believe it will be better served when there are N numbers of players and N is greater than one (hee). They're looking to invest and to provide choice for advertisers, publishers and consumers.

They hope that through their investments, they'll be able to play a significant role in creating choice. They think they have some unique value to bring.

Danny: Is there a danger that Google becomes so entrenched that you can't pull away share?

Google is already entrenched. When you have a competitor like that you have to focus on disruptive ways to change the paradigm. That can be in the user experience, in the business model, in the distribution, etc. Their focus is how they can continue to innovate on the broad horizontal relevance of search. They're going to amplify the areas where they look at verticals. They want to connect buyers and sellers. It's a long-term investment.

Years ago they said they were going to get into the process of building servers, and they were told they'd never do it because they were a software company. People joke that Microsoft NT stood for Nice Try. When they look online, they're going to take the same long term approach. They're going to be thoughtful and recognize that they have an entrenched player. They're going to deliver on innovation and grow their share and value to the market.

Danny: What is the most innovative and disruptive thing Microsoft has done?

Improvements in image search, video search, the integration of Tell Me on mobile, Farecast, etc. They're changing the way people go from individual queries to a task. There are a lot of areas they can point to for innovative. With Cashback, they're trying to change the business model. They want to reward consumers for shopping and do it in a way that's good for the merchant and the advertiser. They're trying to differentiate the product in a way that benefits advertisers.

Danny asks about the Cashback program. Have you had any results in where it's going yet?

The team looks at it every day. They're monitoring it and watching traffic and making sure that everything is working effectively. They're on top of that on a real-time basis. Over a year ago, they had this concept that said search is about connecting the buyers with sellers. In the process you ask why the middle man keeps all the money. They're looking for a way to reward users for their actions. The concept of Cashback has been around for a year. A year ago they tested the concept of consumer loyalty in search. They launched Live Search Club and saw a 2 or 3 points of share increase in a 60 day period. That led to them acquiring JellyFish. They think Cashback is one element of changing the business model.

[It concerns me how much hope they're putting into Cashback. It's not going anywhere.]

Danny: Are there any other kinds of loyalty programs we're likely to see?

You'll see loyal among three verticals - Entertainment, Commercial Intent, Reference - and on the broad horizontal. They're focusing on all of those. The first wave that they're going to amplify is Commercial Intent. Over the next year you'll see much more focus on that. Cashback is a key pillar. As they learn, you'll see that evolve. He expects to see Cashback evolve over a lot of new loyalty programs.

Danny: What's the biggest obstacle to getting people to use your search product?

You have to recognize that the brand Google is a very strong brand. When users think of Google, they think of search. When you have an entrenched competitor you need to make your brand and your offering stand for something. They need to focus more on distribution. This week they announced their distribution deal with HP. As users try it, that user experience starts to create a brand image. Then you have to do the marketing that reinforces that brand image or brand perception.

Danny: What's your top advantage?

They have great engineering resources. They have the opportunity to take the long term perspective. They're going to deliver innovation in a way that is impactful for the consumer. By doing that they think when consumers think of product search or travel search, they think they should use them. They recognize that commercial intent queries make up 30 percent of the search queries but it makes up 80 percent of the revenue.

Danny: Google's greatest advantage is their brand. What's their weakness?

User experience hasn't changed much. Any time you have some legacy experience, there's some risk of change. That's their Achilles heel. He wants Microsoft to think out of the box and do new things. They have teams constantly trying different ideas. They're constantly measuring. He thinks there's a new paradigm that users will wants and embrace, but it's up to them to deliver.

[I love how Microsoft is suddenly the "underdog" and Google is the one stuck in its corporate ways.]

Danny: Why not go back to the MSN brand? People don't seem to like Live.

Their marketing teams are focusing on the brand problem. They can deal with it more now that they've backed away from Yahoo. He acknowledges that they need to get that fixed. He asks Danny for suggestions. Heh.

Danny: In terms of the fixing, does fix mean change or build or what?

Fix means fix. If that means you have to change it, then change it. If that means build it, then build it. Fix means fix.

Danny tries to get some dirt on the Yahoo acquisition but Kevin's not giving him any. It's the same spiel we've been hearing for weeks. They made a bid, hoped Yahoo would find it fair, but now they're moving on. They'll see where the dialogue leads.

Danny: Back to distribution: the HP deal was a big win. What other places are you looking to make changes?

You think of distribution broadly. There are a variety of ways you can get distribution. They're going to work the full range. Some ways are better than others. It's a combination of distribution and good marketing. To get good marketing, you have to make your brand stand for something.

Danny: Do you think search is being over-credited for conversions happening online?

Search provides great line of sight metrics and analytics for the advertisers. What they're trying to do with the Atlas institute is engagement mapping. They want to see how display and rich media ads are performing to provide advertisers the end-to-end view they need to balance their media mix. Everyone is interested in how they're driving conversions. It also provides tools for search marketers to look at the broad set of investments that really drive what they want.

Danny: If search is a long term gain, one of the things I'd give Google credit for is Google Books. Then in September you rolled out Microsoft Books and Academic [Danny means Live Search Books--Susan] and then you took it away

It's not gone. We've scanned millions of journal articles and books. We're going to keep doing that. What we've done is say because of the advanced tools, it's more efficient to have first party publishers doing that scanning themselves. Users are still going to be able to find them. We're putting the publishers in control of their content. We'll be there to help them with tools. The industry is maturing.

Danny was upset with Google's DoubleClick acquisition, but Microsoft also has its own search company. Shouldn't you do what Google did and split them off?

When we acquired aQuanitve it also included Avenue A | Razorfish. They're operating it at arm's length. The ad platform is there to serve publishers and it's there to serve advertisers. They think running those things in conjunction help them to run their ad platform better.

Danny: What's Microsoft's tagline?

In the online world we're investing to create a world class ad platform. They're investing in that in a way that provides the industry choice.

Danny says that's not a tagline. In 4 or 5 words, what is Microsoft about?

They're a company that believes in software plus services.

Danny: How do you define success?'

Getting more and more publishers and more and more inventory. They've had success in that but it's been in things other than search. They really need to increase search. To him success is if they can carve out the differentiation and make the brand stand for something related to commercial intent.

Question and Answer

What improvements are going to made to adCenter? Can we get an offline editor?

Last September, he spent a week in NY visiting search marketers. The feedback fell into buckets - make your tools easier, it takes too long to get keywords into the system and more inventory/share of search. That was the feedback. With adCenter, they've continued to make improvements. This week they'll announce an adCenter offline tool. That's just one step in the process. Visit the Microsoft booth for an invitation to the editor.

When I think of search I think of Microsoft as The Man and Google as a way to get at The Man, how do you plan to overcome that perception?

Google's entrenched. In any industry, choice is good. At the end of the day you have to deliver a great product. If you do that, users will use your product. They have to grow their market share and they'll do that by innovating.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 3/08 at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Live Search, Microsoft, SEM Events, Search Engines, liveblog, smxseattle08

May 28, 2008

SEO Headlines

The Belgians Are Back Bothering Google!

I received quite a treat this morning when I was listening to the DailySearchCast and heard Danny mention that those funny Belgians are back in the spotlight and causing trouble for Google. You may remember that I've been rather vocal about how stupid I find this whole situation to be. If you don't remember, here's the breakdown: A group of Belgian newspapers sued Google for copyright infringement because they (the Belgians) were too lazy to use a robots.txt file, which landed their articles in Google News. They didn't seem to like that. In some crazy universe where fair use does not exist, the Belgians actually won their lawsuit and Google had to place a ridiculous note on their home page and remove the content. And now the Belgians are back!

Since we last heard from them, Google appealed the judgment and tried to negotiate with the Belgian newspapers outside of court. Sadly, the negotiations weren't going as quickly as the newspapers would have liked and Google began referencing the papers again. Now the Belgian newspapers are asking the courts to award them $77 million in damages. Seventy-seven million dollars!

I'm sorry, but I'm still inclined to file this away as the Most Ridiculous Lawsuit Ever. I know we have commenters who like to come and correct me each time I mention the Belgians and their idiocy, but I haven't been swayed. And this new twist to the story just adds to its lunacy. As Danny joked on the SearchCast this morning, I doubt that the Belgian newspapers have made a combined $77 million since Google News was born, so that seems a bit hard to claim that Google has cost them that much. We'll see what happens. All I know is that Google vs. The Crazy Belgians are what good blog entries are made of.

CW: Watch This Show Online, That One Offline

In stupid company news, after taking Gossip Girl offline due to too many viewers, the CW is now looking to create "cwingers". What in God's name is a cwinger? It's an ad-supported video clip that lives half online/half offline. Basically, viewers will get to see a short video inside their favorite CW show, and then they'll have to go online to get the next installment before the conclusion airs on TV. [...huh? --Susan] It's three parts. The first airs on television, the second airs on the Internet and the third airs on television. See how confusing?

Um, hi, as a loyal CW television, you're completely confusing me. What do you want me to do? How do you want me to consume your programming?

The CW is sending a mixed message with the way they're handling online video. You either embrace it or you don't. I don't think you can pull your flagship show offline one week, and then decide to create a whole new "cwinger" format the next. Maybe I'm wrong. The CW has been pretty nonconventional with the way they've done programming in the past, so it may just work.

Horrible name aside (Cwingers? Is this a child porn ring?), I think the CW is going to confuse viewers. You're telling them not to watch X online but to remember to tune into Y and Z so they can see how the story unfolds? Pick a brand message and stick with it.

Yahoo Will Soon Announce A Deal With...Someone

BusinessWeek says that amidst pressure from shareholders, Yahoo will work out a deal with Microsoft...or Google. Yup, the deal is so close that Yahoo doesn't even know who it will be with yet. Either way, BusinessWeek says that "something" will definitely happen soon. Right. Like my head will explode from all the baseless speculation.

Oh, the stupidity headache.

Fun Finds

Andy Beal gives us all a reminder that SEM Scholarship entries will start appearing Marketing Pilgrim today, so make sure you keep your eyes open for the next big SEO/SEM superstar.

Wired's founding editor Louis Rossetto writes a letter to his sons and recalls the dawn of the digital revolution.

Do WiFi allergies exist? [No. --Susan]

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/28/08 at 2:04 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Branding, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo

May 21, 2008

Live Search Cashback: It's Smart, But It Will Fail

Everyone's cringing at the recent announcement that Microsoft will start paying searchers in an attempt to lure them over to their engine and get them out of the clutches of Google. It's pretty much the saddest story you'll hear all day NOT about abandoned or one-armed babies.

I don't have the heart to describe the program myself, so let's hear how Microsoft describes its new Live Search Cashback program:

"You will be able to earn cashback savings based on a percentage of the product price. Your savings will be paid to you via your choice of a deposit to your PayPal account, direct deposit to your bank account, or a check in the mail. It's that simple!"

That simple and that sad. Why is Microsoft offering pay its users? Let's again consult Microsoft:

"We want to earn your loyalty and reward it with cashback savings for your everyday online shopping. We are "The Search That Pays You Back"! "

Isn't your heart breaking just a little bit for them?

The thing is, in theory, it's not even a bad idea. Encourage people to make purchases by searching through your engine and then give them a bit of a cash break (anywhere between 2 percent to more than 30 percent) when they buy from participating retailers. It's a cost per acquisition model designed to get more people searching on Live and to hit Google where it hurts by stealing away valuable advertising dollars. It also gets more eyeballs to adCenter, which is an idea I like very much.

In theory, I get it. However, in practice there's not a single person alive who doesn't know it will totally fail. Why? Because if your search engine isn't up to par, not even "cold hard cash" will get people to use it. Searchers don't reward mediocrity, especially when they're already searching with an engine that doesn't suck.

A note to Microsoft, Yahoo and whoever else is out there reading this: If you're going to beat Google it has to be done through innovation. Not with backdoor bribery. Figure it out.

And someone please figure it out. We don't need any more engines promising to give searchers money or prizes or iPods. Heck, this isn't even the first time Microsoft has tried this approach. We saw it in 2006, as well. All searchers want is an engine that's relevant, trustworthy and that cares about their users.

If you want to read more about Live Search Cashback you can check out the new site or read through the FAQ. I wouldn't bother. It will just depress you and the program probably won't even be around that long. Instead, let's all watch Steve Balmer getting pelted with eggs. After this launch, he almost deserves it.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/21/08 at 11:40 AM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Branding, Microsoft

May 19, 2008

SEO Weekend Update

Microsoft, Yahoo Continue To Annoy Me

I didn't really believe that all the MicroHoo chatter was behind us, but part of me really, really hoped. I'm a little tired of talking about nonevents, but here we are again. On Sunday, Microsoft issued another weekend statement saying that they're "continuing to explore and pursue...an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!" Er, what does that even mean? Epic Yawn, Microsoft.

No one really knows what Microsoft's cryptic note refer to, but we're all guessing anyway. The most popular theory is that Microsoft is looking to get its hands on some of Yahoo's search share. Sounds viable. Personally, I think the way Yahoo can best help Microsoft is to bring some eyeballs to Microsoft adCenter, which most agree is the best ad serving platform that no one's using. I'd love to see that platform get some actual traffic.

Regardless of what Microsoft's latest sonnet really means, Yahoo appears to be back the bargaining table, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that its own stakeholders were revolting. Fun!

Should Brands Buy Back Their Fan Pages On Facebook?

There's a post over on The Unofficial Facebook Guide that tells the sad story of users getting banned for creating branded fan pages. Nick O'Neill writes that ever since Facebook unveiled Fan pages onto the site, enthused brand evangelists have been jumping at the chance to create pages for the brands they love. Sadly, it seems the pages they've created are being taken down and, in some cases the users' accounts are being banned. Yikes.

While banning personal accounts because a user was excited about a feature you offer is 100 percent ludicrous, I do think it's a good idea for brands to take control of their Facebook pages, even if John Battelle doesn't. Sure, it's likely that these brand evangelists are completely well-intentioned but I don't think you should hand over your logo, your message, or your public face to someone simply because they were first to try and register the page. You also don't want a hundred splinter Fan pages sprouting up for your brand, you want one official one where all of your fans can unite and support you. And if your Fan page is going to be in front of that many eyeballs, you want to make sure you're the one in control of it.

Remember our friend Jackie Liebergott from last week? On Thursday I wrote that My College President Kills Kittens and showed how someone had created a false Facebook profile for Jackie Liebergott, the president of my alma mater Emerson College. Well, it turns out they've also created a fake Jackie Liebergott Fan page. Now, if you were Emerson College, wouldn't you want to get control of that page? Poor kitten-killer Liebergott.

Encourage users to engage, to write wall posts, to answer polls, to go out in the real world and evangelize, but you have to hold on to the keys. Otherwise you're just opening yourself up for disaster.

Would Yahoo Be Stronger Without Search?

At Search Engine Journal, Loren Baker asks if Yahoo would be stronger without search. It's an interesting theory but not one I'm inclined to support. Perhaps Loren's right in that Yahoo would become more profitable, but it's still not a direction I want to see them take. They might make more money but would you still respect them in the morning? I wouldn't. It's not a good course for them and it's sure not going to help the industry any.

Personally, I'd rather see someone step in and get Yahoo to start leveraging their many verticals. Yahoo has all the portal strength an engine could ask for, and yet they're not using it. Tapping into all of that is how Yahoo will succeed and grow. I still have faith in Yahoo and I don't want to see them sell out and become completely useless. Someone has to come along and challenge Google. Yahoo's sitting back at a pretty distant second right now, but Google's not going to reign forever. At some point, someone will come up and beat them. That will never be Yahoo if they hang up their gloves before the fight is over.

Hang in there, Yahoo. Don't be so quick to sell out. Even if Microsoft does keep sweet talking you back to the table.

Fun Finds

Copyblogger has launched a Twitter Writing Contest. You write your best 140 character story and the winner receives an iPod Nano 4 GB. Your story has to be exactly 140 characters. Over or under isn't going to cut it. Good luck!

Darren Rowse lists 12 Traits of Successful Bloggers even though the URL says eleven. Don't be fooled.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/19/08 at 4:41 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Branding, Microsoft, Yahoo

May 1, 2008

SEO Headlines

Microsoft Raises Its Yahoo Bid. Slightly.

It looks like Yahoo's shameless flirting with Google may have worked, as the latest is that Microsoft's board of directors will raise their initial bid of $31 a share to $32-$33 a share. It's not quite the number Yahoo was hoping but it sure is a lot closer and frankly quite generous given where their stock is currently sitting. It's also a lot friendlier than the hostile takeover Microsoft threatened if Yahoo didn't come around by last weekend. But don't think Steve Ballmer has gone soft. Steve says he knows exactly what Yahoo is worth and that he won't pay a penny more. He expects the situation to resolved "in short order". Okay then!

Based on the Wall Street Journal article, it looks like the decision on what to do will fall on Steve Ballmer's shoulders. What will Ballmer do: Raise the bid again, go with the hostile take over or just walk out and open up Yahoo to be bought by someone else? We'll have to stay tuned in to find out. I know that I, for one, am riveted. [grabs popcorn]

Web Analytics Intervention

Perhaps it's because the spirit of eMetrics is in the air, but we're starting to see a lot of great Web analytics content coming out! This time around, Shane Atchison issues A Web Analytics Intervention, Part 2 which serves as a 7-step great walk through to help get virtually anyone on the path to Analytics success. Shane identifies the 7 steps to Analytics bliss as:

1. Admit There's a Problem
2. Admit the Problem is Your Own
3. Agree This Is A Corporate Intervention
4. Set Your Goals
5. Anticipate Risks
6. Know You're On The Right Track
7. Summarize the Journey

Love it. And you know it's going to be that first step that's the hardest to get everyone to sign off on. A lot of times executives are simply unwilling to invest in analytics because they don't understand its value. For these occasions, Matt Bailey suggests turning it into a story and stripping away all the geek speak. I think that's a really good way to ease executives into things and get them thinking the right way. Once you tackle that first step, the rest should be a breeze!

Get Over Your Inferiority Complex, Loser!

Over at ProBlogger, Darren Rowse offers up a remedy for blogger inferiority complex and gives readers a guide on how to focus on the positive, put the bad into perspective and tackle the blogosphere with your passion and purpose rekindled. Huzzah!

The article is definitely worthy of a read. We all have a tendency to focus on the things we're lacking and ignore the stuff we do have in our favor. And you can replace "blogging" with whatever it is you do on a daily basis. If you're an SEO, there's a reason you got in the business. You had some knowledge, talent or desire that made you think THIS is what I want to do! As spring swings into effect, take some time to explore what you have going for you and find ways to build upon that. Everything else is being reborn you may as well be too. :)

Fun Finds

Susan and I went head-to-head in the SEO Newsletter this week. My article Smaller Size Means Bigger Rewards talked about the value of small search conferences and took on her The Value of Going Big. Give 'em both a read and let us know which side of the fence you fall on.

Barry Schwartz mentions over at Search Engine Land that SEMPO is now offering agency training certification.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 05/ 1/08 at 3:22 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Blogging, Microsoft, Yahoo

April 9, 2008

Yahoo’s Big Day of Fun

So, let’s talk about Yahoo, eh?

Yahoo Brings Relevant Video To Flickr

The news that Yahoo was integrated video into its photo site broke yesterday and I pretty much ignored it, assuming it would be lame attempt to compete with YouTube and that it wouldn’t bring value to anything. It’s a good thing I can admit when I’m wrong.

I was totally wrong.

As explained on the Flickr blog, the video capabilities they’re launching aren’t an attempt to compete with YouTube at all; they’re actually perfectly targeted to the very loyal Flickr community. The video option is only available to users with a “pro” Flickr account, and videos can’t be any longer than 90 seconds or larger than 150 MB. It’s clear Flickr is looking for video content that you have created yourself, not copyrighted videos you’re stealing from someone else. Where YouTube is about boobs and skateboard accidents, Flickr is about sharing home movies and personal experiences. Sweet, right?

I really like the approach Flickr and Yahoo have taken here. It’s not about competing with Google and YouTube. It’s about finding a way to bring value to their community by adding new features that will enrich their experience. Not giving them features they didn’t ask for and don’t want. Props to Yahoo on this one.

Yahoo Finds Web Analytics Service In IndexTool Acquisition

After Yahoo showed how cool they were in the video department, they opted to purchase an analytics company and show everyone they can rock that too. Through their acquisition of Tensa Kft, Yahoo will take control of IndexTools, a customizable Web analytics package targeted towards small-to-medium sized businesses advertising on Yahoo. The purchase puts Yahoo in a great position to compete with the top tier Web analytics programs out there.

From the Yahoo press release:

“[Yahoo] today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire substantially all of the assets of Tensa Kft., more commonly known as IndexTools, a leading provider of Web analytics software for online marketing….Upon completion of the acquisition, the addition of the IndexTools’ assets is intended to expand Yahoo!’s powerful set of services designed to maximize its clients’ online marketing efforts.”

Eric Peterson is much smarter than me and issued his own How Yahoo! Buying IndexTools Changes Web Analytics that I would very much encourage you to read. In it Eric outlines why this could be a game changer for the Analytics industry and predicts that Yahoo will charge for the service at first, and then make it free down the line. His post is filled with good nuggets.

Yahoo Will Outsource Search Ads to Google

The most exciting piece of Yahoo news is their confirmation that they will be testing Google paid search ads alongside its own for the next two weeks. Yahoo says Google ads will appear on no more than 3 percent of its SERPs. They test is designed for both Yahoo and Google to evaluate the revenue potential of a broader, long-term deal. Obviously there’s lots of speculation that Yahoo is doing this in a last ditch effort to avoid being bought out by Microsoft and to show them they still have some fight left.

The truth is, Google clearly has the bigger ad inventory so outsourcing to them may be a good way for Yahoo to increase their revenue, even if it does somewhat make them look like a little kid running to their mommy to fix a boo boo. It’s also disappointing to see even after the launch of Panama, Yahoo still can’t hold its own in the area of paid search.

Predictably, Microsoft isn’t reacting well to the news and has once again pulled out the “you’ll ruin the competitiveness of the Internet” card. I don’t think that argument holds up though. As Danny Sullivan pointed out at Search Engine Land, Google’s not buying Yahoo, they’re just partnering with them. And we’ve already had a situation where one company owned more than 90 percent of the paid search market. It was Overture back in the day. No one stepped in then. Also, Microsoft, shut up. You don’t seem too concerned about protecting the sanctity of the Internet when you’re the one trouncing all over it.

It’s been a busy few days for Yahoo. With scorned love letters being passed back and forth with Microsoft, to adding video to Flickr, buying a Web analytics company and now testing out Google ads, you have to give Yahoo credit. We haven’t seen this much excitement coming out of the number two engine in quite some time.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/ 9/08 at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, Yahoo

April 7, 2008

Weekend Update

Microsoft/Yahoo Having Problems

This week on Days of Our Microhoo, Microsoft wrote Yahoo a mean letter saying that they don’t appreciate Yahoo not immediately bowing down to them and in response MS will launch a proxy fight in the next three weeks until Yahoo comes to its senses. In response, Yahoo leaked a letter of their own via carrier pigeon saying: Um, hi, we’re open to talks of marriage but back off if you’re not willing to up your price. We’re a respectable lady and we expect to be treated as such! Thirty-one dollars an hour a share ain’t gonna cut it!

Or that’s my take. Michael Arrington called Microsoft and Yahoo two guys at a bar:

“You ever see two guys in a bar pushing each other saying “come on, man, let’s do this”? Then the other guy says “come on, I’m waiting.” Then the other guy says “right now…any time.” Then the other guy…zzzzzzz Someone, please throw a punch already.”

Hee. Basically, all of this weekend’s excitement didn’t bring us anything new to report. We just feel it’s important to mention that Yahoo and Microsoft are still considering going steady, if only they could agree on the terms of the first date. Love is so confusing.

Being On The First Page Is Important. Users Like Blended Results

A great study by iProspect tells us lots of stuff we already know. For example, we hear that users are more likely to click on a news/image/video listing if it appears in their blended search results (as opposed to searching specific verticals), that showing up for your site’s keywords helps users associate your brand with that term, and that 68 percent of users click on results found on the first SERP.

Yup. Everything you already knew but apparently needed numbers to prove.

If there’s one benefit to the Captain Obvious study is the renewed focused on getting your video, images and other types of content optimized for blended search. Sure, it’s good that you have video on your site or images that users can call upon, but you can’t expect them to do a Google Image or Google Video search to find them. It’s your responsibility to put the content where users are going to find it.

Use Caution When Blogging

Blog Herald issues a good reminder that blogging should be done at your own risk. In his post, Andrew G.R. tells the story of a public official whose job is on the line after he blogged that the bar responsible for canceling a band scheduled to perform at his birthday bash would be “[expletive] blackballed” for their actions. Folks are now calling for the public official to resign.

Personally, I think this gentleman is getting a bigger light shone on him because he’s a public official with zero right to a private life, but it does raise the “can you get fired for blogging” question.

As Heather Armstrong will tell you, yes, getting dooced happens. If you’re going to start any type of a blog, I would suggest running it by whoever you work for and blogging about things that won’t affect your livelihood. For example, if this is going to be one of those crazy blogs that anyone on the vast Internetz can read, don’t blog about what a jerk your boss is. He’ll find out. I know you think that he won’t and that you’re all types of super secretive, but he will. You have an absolutel right to free speech, but your employer has an equal right for firing you for “leaking company secrets” or “revealing confidential information” or whatever it is they want to call it to get you to shut up.

Of course, if they do fire you, then you can probably blog about them all you want. Huzzah!

Fun Finds

It probably says something horrible about me that I’m adding this to the Fun Finds, but the New York Times says that too much blogging will kill you dead. I can think of worse ways to go, I guess. [Hmm, worse fate: getting dooced or death by blogging?--Susan] I vote getting dooced is worse. At least if you die, you went out doing something you loved. And it makes for a better TechMeme headline.

Problogger asks what’s your biggest blogging mistake? Was it destroying your brand in a flame war?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/ 7/08 at 4:45 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Blogging, Branding, Microsoft, Yahoo

February 27, 2008

Search Ads & Behavioral Targeting.

I have tea. This may be the only thing getting me through this afternoon. I think I'm getting a cold or something. Let's just keep things simple, okay? Speakers for this panel are Kelly Gillease (Viator.com), David Kopp (Yahoo!), Jonathan Mendez (RAMP Digital) and Natala Menezes, (Microsoft). Chris Sherman (Search Engine Land) moderates.

Chris starts off by discussing how behavioral targeting is really the up and coming approach of the future for targeting ads to users. It's a pretty unique way of reaching out to someone based on a whole series of behaviors.

Jonathan Mendez is going first.

Search is the original behavioral targeter. He plugs his new company a little.

Personalization and Targeting areas to focus on:
1. Build segments and Affinities
2. Hypothesize relevance
3. Create and develop
4. Test and validate
5. Monitor

In terms of segmentation, think thick slices for high impact. Even a small lift across a wide amount of people will make a huge difference. There are a lot of different ways that you can go about creating your slices. Think about who they are, how they reached you, how many times they've been around. Keep the environment in mind. Where they are, what language they speak, what resolution they're using and what browser they're using.

Take a look at the search URL. There is a wealth of information in the parameters that Google provides and obviously you can add your own as well if you're doing tracking. Don’t underestimate cookies for tracking people.

If you see a lot of people coming in from one particular segment and landing on a particular page, customize that page to reach them.

Temporal targeting, if one page does better on week days and another on week ends, direct people to those. Customize those for the people who are looking for them.

Social search is very useful for creating segments.

Bringing the behavioral targeting from the search page to the Web site so that you're customizing things on the actual page. You can customize the ads on your site based semantically. He uses Edmunds as an example.

Kelly Gillease steps up as Jonathan takes his bow. Her company is a niche provider of destination travel products like sightseeing tours, theater tickets, etc. I may bookmark that.

They're working on getting their brand name out there even more. So they were running a banner ads targeting the people who were visiting but not buying. They have a fairly strong search program in terms of visits and sales but low overall brand and category awareness. While they get a lot of visits, they need to build brand trust.

Only 8% of visitors see their homepage, 20% of people didn't know that you could book these sorts of activities in advance. One thing they learned from their test was that there is an enormous amount of interplay between banner ads and search.

Resist the temptation to silo marketing programs. Assess the impact ofo display campaigns across programs, especially search. A banner campaign needs a search campaign. If you're going to launch banner ads, make sure that when they search on the term they can find you too. Close the loop and let them build on each other.

Our next speakers is Natalia Menezes . Audience intelligence and what that means. What does behavior mean? What is Microsoft doing about it.

They did a study on searcher moms. 2/3 of the moms use search after seeing ads elsewhere.

Targeting a specific searcher by profile. How do you reach two very different segments searching for financial planning? Ignore the demographic and psychographic markers. (Really? I think the Persona modelers would disagree.) Look at what they're doing, what have they searched for, visited, bought. You need two key pieces of data: a list of users and a sample of site visitors.

The more you know about a user the more they convert but the more you know, the lower your rate of interaction is as well. You know fewer people really well.

They're testing two demographic tools: commercial intent of queries and demographic prediction

Tomorrow they're going to a behavioral targeting system. If you're interested in testing any of their tools, you can fill out a form for their beta.

David Kopp is up now, he looks startled. It's okay. I don't know what's going on either.

Behavioral targeting enables you to focus on user intent. What is it? It's modeling users' behavior to derive intent. Technology + Reach + Insight = Relevance. Behavioral targeting used to be very rigid and rule based but now they're taking in a lot more information and taking into account a lot of other factors to help them determine what the user means. They think they have not just a very wide reach but also a very deep reach. They get an average of 1800 page views per user across a variety of portals, they're able to base their decisions on an unmatched level of precision. Big words. Backed up with some pretty impressive stats from case studies.

I'm feeling a little dizzy so I'm going to skip the Q&A portion. I apologize.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/27/08 at 3:58 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Analytics, Microsoft, Yahoo, smxwest2008

February 26, 2008

Search 3.0: Online Retail & Blended Search

All right, last session of the day, let's get through this and then go party, what do you say? Here's the line up. Our moderator is Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land; the speakers will be Liana Evans, KeyRelevance; Chris Smith, NetConcepts and Phil Stelter.

For Team Q&A: moderator Mike McDonald, WebProNews, plus speakers Paul Dillon, Live Search Shopping, Microsoft and Ken Kronquist, Yahoo! Shopping.

Li Evans is up first.

Why care about blended results? You get more opportunities in the SERPS. It creates engagement, builds traffic, generates buzz.

What are blended results? Everything except the ten blue links. She's speaking quite quickly. She does a quick example with Bare Escentuals and how they're using video. YouTube offers a lot of ways to label and tag the videos. They're doing a great job on their brand but not on more generic terms.

Another major opportunity is the 'How to'. Make a video on how to do something. That's a huge opportunity. Google calls video results "zippies". Really?

Two videos on how to tie a tie: One is optimized, the other isn't. The optimized one has twice as many views but the non-optimized one has links from Lifehacker. Just goes to show the power of a really good authority link.

Social Media sites are important. Your own site should be properly optimized as well. House your own videos, podcasts, images, etc.

You need to have analytics. Conversion isn't just the immediate purchase.

Chris Smith steps up. His shirt has silver threads. It's shiny, I rather like it. Yes, this what my brain has been reduced to.

Will it blend? Shopping results and keyword search results. Do your shopping results stand a chance of showing up in the blended results? How do you do that?

How do you make the product results show up in Google? Product names, like book titles and authors. Specific queries, not general ones. Right now, it's hit and miss. Everyone's seen an example where the difference is just a comma.

Use a product name and something that says what the thing is. Too many people use a product number and that's not a good.

Yahoo is slightly more difficult to get products to come up. Electronics are easier than books but you'll have to do some experiments.

Microsoft includes images in their product result, which is nice. You also have the expand and narrow search options on the side. [Amusingly the screenshot is of a search for Zune but Chris has labeled it a Palm Treo.]

Mention what the product is in the title. A really hip end user will type in the technical gobbledegook but most people will be using something more like English.

• Create feed and optimize according to the source of best potential benefit.
• Create good accurate titles
• Use long tail terms
• ALWAYS include a pic
• Insure that pictures are available through Image Search
• Seller ratings play big role in rankings in Google - manage your rating at contributer sources like Dealtime, Nextag, PriceGrabber, etc.
• Product ratings are important
• Appears that product names + brand names in item titles may work better - unable to really invoke non-brand names searches
• Other factors that may play a part
  • Site Pagerank
  • Prices
  • Web site popularity for keyword - SEO value
  • User click behavior and time on product page?
  • Quality scores? Keyword density/word order?

Phil Stelter steps up.

He quickly summarizes what you should be doing: Optimize your product feed, Yahoo SSP search (Yahoo SSP is Blended's OG.)

Prioritize by your potential return. Remember that Google has a huge lead in market share.

Remember that blended search is a work in progress. Things are going to shift and change.

Two major implications:

• Organic is going to strengthen its role as a research and brand vehicle.
• SEO is going to have to refocus from keyword to user relevance.

Tips and Tricks:

1. Create Quality Content
2. Find a Trend and Whip It (Good)
3. Respect the Sources
4. Become a Reference
5. Test Now
6. Embrace New Dimensions in search.

Q&A

Vanessa asks the search reps if they have any comments before we begin Q&A.

Paul: Blended search is here to stay. People are using search engines to research about you and your products every day. We need to do a better job in helping them do that.

Ken: I think it's a good idea to take advantage of paid inclusion programs. Things like images are very important in increasing the click through rates. Using ISBNs and product codes are important in getting things mapped to a database.

Is there a plan to standardize feed formats like Sitemaps has been?

Paul: Live already accepts a few different feeds. We'd like one. [Paul, please lean into the mic, it's really hard to hear you!]

Chris: It's a little frustrating to try to follow Google Bases protocols. They need better documentation.

More about needing images for Live?

Paul: We look at the quality of the feeds and the pictures. We really want to create a good experience.

Ken: The same strategy applies for Yahoo! Shopping. Even if there wasn't a penalty for not having an image, the click through rate is very very different.

Li: Make sure it's the right image too. Shoppers are visual.

Chris: Make sure that the engines can index the images. AJAX and Flash can be a barrier.

Are you seeing better click throughs on blended?

Ken: Uh, we can't really talk about that but in general, yeah, the click through is better with images.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. Also rating and reviews make a difference.

Is it worth the time to watermark your image with your domain name?

Li: It depends on how much time you want to spend on it.

Chris: I see people who don't want to let their property and images be stolen so they won't allow them to be indexed and that's a mistake. I don't think watermarking is a huge issue. Wouldn't suggest it.

Best practices for captions beyond just keywords?

Li: They should make sense. Don't worry so much about formatting bold or italics.

What suggestions do you have for an all Flash Web site?

Li: Get them out of the Flash.

Phil: What is that they're trying to do?

From the audience: Start a blog, talk about the wedding, add photos.

Li: That's a good opportunity for rating and reviews.

Chris: The blog is an excellent idea. It's a little high maintenance. Take all their images and upload them into Flickr. Wedding is one of the most popular tags. If you can rank through that, you've got a lot of opportunity.

What's the difference between Google Products and Google Base?

Phil: Products is newer. Base was a kind of idealistic push, just please give us everything.

Vanessa: Basically they're two separate feeds.

If you're only going to choose one, go with Products.

Does the age of your feeds matter?

Ken: It's not really a factor for us. We trust the information the merchant sends us.

Paul: I would say the same thing. We want the mostly timely and accurate information.

Chris: Stability and longevity of a Web page has been a factor for SEO. So it could be that there are major retailer who get more trust because their site is older but not necessarily because of the feed.

What do I do for seasonal items?

General answer, remove it from the feed, leave it on the site, offer the user some kind of good experience (when will it be back, information, mail me feature.)

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/26/08 at 5:40 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, smxwest2008

The Economics of Search

I love the music here at SMX. It's awesome.

It's time for my brain to explode. Moderator Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land and speakers Peter A Coles, Harvard Business School; Michael Schwarz, Yahoo! Research and Hal Varian, Google will all prove how much smarter they are than me.
Mike McDonald, WebProNews will be moderating the Q&A for all the 'um, what?' questions. Mark Mahaney from Citigroup Investment Research is also joining us as well.

Chris Sherman starts us off with why they're doing this session in the first place. Many search marketers know the marketing side but they don't know the other side of the equation, what are the engines thinking about, how do they make money?

Michael Schwarz is up first. He's a marketplace designer. You can complain to him about the interface. He says there are two main questions to ask, one hard, one easy. How do we balance the interests of advertisers and search engines? And what are the key areas of economics involved?

There is no tradeoff in his mind between revenue and satisfying advertisers and users. Maximizing value delivered to user and advertisers approximately maximizes search engine's profits (a theorem, not a slogan).

Do the interests ever conflict? He'd like to have an example but overall he thinks that there are usually small variations if any.

What's the future of sponsored search?

The main competitor of Google and Yahoo in sponsored search is organic listings. If search comes to dominate the SS, the business model will have to change. The reason people click on sponsored listing is because they're good answers to the query. In a nutshell, people click on sponsored search is because organic search sucks.

Organic search is easy to spam, but sponsored isn't so much because you have to put your money where your mouth is. One of these days someone may figure out organic search and then sponsored search will be in trouble.

The Major Challenges

• Making SS more relevant
• Better measures of user experience
• Better advertiser tools
• More targeting, smarter advanced match.

Targeting is sort of a two edged sword. The problem is that you're being smart and targeting only your area. But someone who isn't as smart isn't targeting and he's everywhere and getting more non-converting traffic.

Convergence of search and display advertisement is coming. Right now, they couldn’t be more different. Search about current intent, display is about demographics. Search for DR, Display is for branding. Search is spot market, display contracts. Even pricing is vastly different. Historically Search was selling for 5c and up. Display for $5000 and up. They have different buyers and different sellers. But convergence is still happening. There's behavioral targeting going on in display and branding going on in sponsored search.

So that's where the future of sponsored search is.

Hal Varian steps up to the mike next.

He says he learned when he was a professor to never teach an economics class at four in the afternoon. It's 3:30. Talk fast. ;)

He's going to talk about how to bid on Adwords. I'll skip most of this because it's all very basic: base it on real search behavior, use long tail keywords, popular keywords aren't always the most effective. Look at the cost per conversion and compare it to the value per acquisition. The value of a click is the probability of a conversion.

How do you determine what your bid should be? …oh wow, math. This was such a bad idea to try to blog this session.

The important thing is the extra cost you pay for the extra clicks is important. You want to bid until the value per click is equal to the incremental cost per click. You'll need to experiment to find this.

Google wants to be giving you better guidance in the future. In my case, I think that means I need to go back to basic math.

If you're hitting a budget constraint all the time, you're doing something wrong. Raise it or lower your bid. If you're making money, why do you have a budget constraint?

Peter Coles is next. Talk slowly, Peter. Please.

He's writing a new course for Harvard right now. Entrepreneurial Market Design. Nifty.

In ad platforms there are two distinct groups. Neither wishes to join without the other. In this case, it's Advertisers and Publishers. As an advertiser, you don't want to join a network if it doesn't have a good reach. As a publisher, the greater number of advertisers, the better your bids are going to be.

Will participants join more than one platform at the same time? For publishers, generally not. They have a limited amount of space that can be used for ads. Advertisers, possibly. You're making a choice between cost vs reach. You have to set up and maintain. Costs are linear in the number of ad platforms. That means joining two networks is twice as expensive as one.

Entering into this world as a network is a chicken and egg problem. No one wants to be the first. Mobilizing the network is particularly challenging when there are strong cross side network effects.

Exacerbating the problem is that publishers are focused on short term profits.

So how do you get around it? You can buy someone else (Like say, oh Microsoft buying Yahoo.). You can focus first on one side: flagship tenant (like BEING Microsoft.)

Differentiation is a double edged sword. For example the length of the text ads. It may have been helpful but it caused problems between people trying to maintain campaigns in more than one networks.

You can try to get in via segmentation. Focus on just one market, like Stubhub did for tickets.

Cross subsidization: Make deals with low profits or margins now to produce benefits elsewhere within the network. Essentially, take less profit in order to grow.

He summarizes quickly all the above problems and possible solutions.

Mark Mahaney from Citigroup Investment Research steps up next. In 2007, direct marketing was $60 billion. $40 billion was spent in newspapers. Yellow pages $20 billion. That's the value of internet marketing because all that's going to move online. E-retail is not recession proof but it's growing. Online travel is growing 14% year over year as well.

Google is large enough as a percentage of the US economy that it shouldn't be surprising that it's going to be impacted by the recession. People are buying less, cutting back. They're naturally going to be searching less.

One mobile search per handset per month in 2010, you're looking at $2.5 billion. At ten searches a month, you're making more than PC based searches. (which is at 35 searches per month right now.)

He thinks that there is no way that Microsoft isn't going to acquire Yahoo. 55% probability.

The impact of a possible MicroHoo! on GOOG:

Will MicroHoo! lead to a search query shift among customers? Probably not
Will MicroHoo! R&D mashup create a better search engine? He's skeptical
Could a larger #2 search engine draw search budgets away from Google? This is the big factor. People might move there because of the stronger secondary market.

Q&A

Would MicroHoo! benefit Ask?

Mark: I think this is going to cause a lot of disruption. Nothing's going to happen before 2010. It's hard to see how it could benefit Ask. It's hard to see how long term how Ask survives as a scalable search engines. [AN: Harsh.]

Why is it taking so long to better help the advertisers?

Hal: We're committed to providing better tools. When you're operating at our scale, it's tough and you want it right on day one.

Michael: I'd love to chat afterwards. Oftentimes one size doesn't fit all, which means that sometimes by offering a tool we're going to be making your life harder instead of easier. If we offer a tool and it's perfect for 10% of the population, then it would be wasting the time of 90% of the population.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 02/26/08 at 4:18 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, Microsoft, Pay Per Click, Search Engines, Yahoo, smxwest2008

February 11, 2008

What’s going on with Yahoo & Microsoft?

Are you tired of reading about Yahoo and Microsoft on every blog under the sun? I know I am. And as a result, we haven’t mentioned it here in an attempt to NOT bore you to tears. However, there is now so much sordid speculation, rampant rumor and pundit pondering that I thought it would be useful to sum some of it and see what’s really happening.

Let’s face it, the coverage regarding the potential Microsoft and Yahoo love connection has been everywhere for a week now, and everyone has an opinion. Seriously, I headed down to San Diego this weekend and even my boat-builder traveling companion was quizzing me on details and offering his personal insight. You can’t escape it, no matter how far away you drive.

And now the conversation is getting even bigger with news that Yahoo will reject Microsoft’s $44.6 billion offer because they feel like it undervalues their company at only $31 a share. Yahoo says they won’t take any less than $40 a share or more, a statement that Robert Scoble has called arrogant. (Pot, kettle, anyone?) It’s possible that Yahoo is just trying to play hardball and get Microsoft to make a counter offer, but what if that doesn’t happen? Nathan Weinberg offers up some possible scenarios for Microsoft, but let’s take a look at Yahoo. What are their options?

• Microsoft forces a hostile takeover: If Microsoft is really serious about buying out Yahoo, they can start pressuring the Yahoo board and talking with shareholders individually to force a vote. If you’re a Yahoo shareholder not too excited about the path Yahoo is on or liking the idea of getting bought out by some deeper pockets, becoming a subsidiary of Microsoft may start to look pretty appealing. It's worth noting that Yahoo will make this scenario somewhat difficult due to the poison pill (via SEL) they adopted in 2001. What this does is allow shareholders to buy Yahoo stock at a bargain price in the event Microsoft starts to accumulate too many shares. This, in turn, increases the number of shares Yahooers own, making it harder for Microsoft to buy them out. Exciting, right? Absolutely. If this happens, SEO blogging in 2008 is going to be a lot of fun. You’ll get to hear all about the riveting antitrust meetings and get to blog “leaked” screenshot of the crappiest, most overhyped search engine to date. Huzzah!
• Yahoo takes help from Google: If Yahoo isn’t okay with being bought out by Microsoft, would they perhaps be open to forming an alliance with Google? Maybe. God knows Google doesn’t want to see Microsoft and Yahoo team up. They’re all about “preserving the underlying principles of the Internet” where Google has more money than everyone else and can tell people what to do. While Google would never get passed antitrust regulators if they tried to all out purchase the company, they may be able to offer some financial assistance if Yahoo decides they want to go it alone. Also, remember that Google owns a 5 percent stake in AOL, which just so happens to related to our next possibility…
• Yahoo partners with AOL: It’s been rumored before and speculation has lit up again thanks to Yahoo’s current situation. If Yahoo were to buy AOL, they could increase their cash flow and strengthen their content network by leveraging all of the AOL entertainment properties. You also have to consider that AOL is owned by Time Warner, which also owns properties like CNN and others. Getting in good with Time Warner now could open them up to lots of new and exciting partnerships down the road. A Yahoo/AOL merger may make some sense from a business perspective, you have to wonder whether or not it would be damaging