MSN Search

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 MSN Search, Microsoft, SEO, SEO Tips & Tricks, Search Engine Optimization

August 20, 2008

Searcher Behavior Research Updates

And we're back from the fastest lunch I've ever eaten. Where does the time go? Moderating this session is Bill Muller (iProspect) and our panelists are John Marshall (Market Motive), Pavan Lee (Microsoft), Dr. Larry Cornett (Yahoo! Search) and Bill Barnes (Enquiro Search). I have to confess I just love the research sessions. Hard data just makes my little heart sing. Come on. You can't tell me you aren't excited about this one too.

I know you are because Bill is telling us about how every year this session totally fills the room it's in. Why? Because if you know more about the way searchers behave, you're going to be a better marketer.

John Marshall starts us off.

The interesting thing about search behavior is that it's not that difficult to get good data. The question is on Monday morning, do you understand search behavior? Most people turn to the keywords report in your analytics tool. That's a reasonable place to start but it's an extremely narrow view of the activity on the Web. You're only look at the keywords that brought people to your site. You only see the search results that brought people to your site. You're running into sample bias.

How can we really see the intent of people, not just the people who made it to your Web site. You don't want the whole forest view. You're probably not going to get the whole forest view anyway unless you have a Hitwise account or something. What you can look at is the single tree of your site.

The trick is to use the site search on your Web site. If you don't have site search, implement it. Even if it doesn't work, it's a great source of user intent. Search engine keywords only give you the people who came to your site. Site search gives you the intent of your users, conversion rate information. A lot of people ignore this data because it's free. Free data is often ignored. If you pay for something, you value it more.

Things that can go wrong:

• Mixed Case -- Google Analytics doesn't automatically change case for you so your data gets scattered across case. You need to convert it.
• Multiple results pages -- Some site search pages for 'no results found' don't get tracked by analytics. Make sure all the pages contain your analytics tracking.
• Usual JavaScript breakage
• Injected terms -- Most Web sites that have site search, they use it as a cheap landing page creation system. You have to filter that out of your data if you're doing that because it's not real data. No one is typing it in.

By using site search you're answering the question: what's the true intent of the users when they're on the site.

Site search data cannot replace competitive analysis but it's the cheapest way to get good data fast.

Pavan Lee is up next. She's from Shanghai.

Background from the New York SES: They've discovered that search listings have a branded value. Paid search listings have a stronger branding impact than organic search. There is a positive branding effect for both. They're trying to measure the brand lift.

They studied five brands in five spaces.

Methodology: Eyetracking and post-search survey.

Key findings: Search display and content ads are effective for branding stand alone but more effective together.

They asked "did you remember seeing an ad" 21% lift content 30% display. 38% both.

I can't see her slides at all.

In all cases with all questions, including lift in purchase intent, there was a brand lift and it was stronger for paired ads.

On the eye tracking side, search is still the most effective tool in attracting attention. There's a roll over impact on a multi-channel exposure. If you see search and display or search and content or search and display and content, it's more effective than just seeing any one of those.

Key takeaway: The power of three. There's a synergistic branding impact across content, display and search ads.

None of this data is public information.

Larry Cornett steps up to the podium.

His talk will build on John's presentation in a lot of ways.

Users do a lot before and after they're on the search page. He's going to talk about that, about the research they're doing, how users experience search, a little about crafting search and how they get from 'to do' to 'done'.

The reality is that the search page is just a tiny slice of online activity. Before the search, the user somehow comes to need to do a search. After the search, they want to go somewhere. They're going somewhere because they want to fulfill a task. The task is not getting to best buy. It's getting an iPhone. You need to know what happens after and how it all links back. How do you support them through the whole lifecycle of what they're trying to accomplish.

There is no single methodology that gives you the whole picture. Some ways that Yahoo does testing are:

• Search editorial
• Bucket testing
• Metrics & Analysis
• Search Science
• Focus Groups and surveys
• Eye-tracking research
• Ethnographic studies

How users experience search

• Starting context (what have they seen and experience before they query)
• Quick Scanning (one to three seconds)
• Information Scent
• Matching intent
• Quick Decisions
• Looking for answers (not a homework exercise. "Don't make me work")
• Feeling safe

They try to help crafting searches with 'search assist' (suggested searches). For most people search is hard. They're not experts.

Focus on the ultimate goal. They're looking to do something, they're wanting an answer. Yahoo SearchMonkey is an attempt at giving them that answer. It gives the user more information about what's behind the link and what's important to know.

What does this mean for marketers?

• Before the SERP
  • Starting context
  • The "Real task"
• On the SERP
  • Intent and information scent
  • Searchmonkey
• After the SERP
  • Fulfilling expectations
  • Being their "answer" and living up to the promise of the search result.

We thought that the reason people were having trouble with search was that it was an artificial session. But field studies showed us that the users were really having trouble formulating queries so we really tried to implement something that would help them.

Bill Barnes is the last to speak.

Their research is grounded in their search marketing and grew out of that.

Why is the first listing seen so important
Why do we scan in groups of 3 or 4
Why branding is important

[Standard heat map image, you've seen it a million times.]

They did experiments with the top SPONSORED listing and played around with really great ad copy versus just 'okay' ad copy.

When they did a survey they didn't ask about the listing, they asked about the search engine and if they'd use it again. The only difference was the ad copy but there was a huge lift in trust in the engine with the great copy.

Working memory: It's what comes to mind with recall. For some reason, we're hardwired to think in threes or fours.

[Oh no, my battery is dying]

There's a 16 percent increase in brand association when brand is the Top Sponsored and Top Organic Results. On an unbranded query. The really interesting thing is that the recognition of OTHER brands drops away at the same time.

There's an 8 percent lift in brand purchase. If you're not there, you lose 16 percent brand lift.

Even for branded queries, you get a brand lift if you appear. Should you buy your branded terms? Yes.

Eyetracking finding: Brand fixation only occurs in the TITLE and the URL not in the description.

If you're a familiar brand to the searcher, they will often skip the sponsored listings at the top. If you're buying the top sponsored, write your copy for a NEW user.

If you have brand A and brand B in sponsored with Brand A in top organic, brand A gets a HUGE lift.

Key Findings:

• INTENT is the most important thing
• Organic and sponsored combined give the biggest brand lift.
• Be aware of who else is on the serp
• Write your ad copy to new clients.
• Don't assume your brand will be in the consideration set. If you're not on the page, you're forgotten.

Q&A

The first question is does offline affect offline. The answer is yes, though the panelists don't say that. Go read the Re Search Online, Purchase Offline session from yesterday.

Why do search views get longer?

Pavan thinks it's because searchers are looking for something in particular whereas display and content ads are push forms of advertising.

Do they really only spend 1-3 seconds and how often do they click?

Larry: It's on average. In some cases, for navigational queries, that's less than a second. It might be longer at home but yeah, it's amazingly fast.

Bill: Females look longer and shop around, males just go straight to results. There's a free paper available.

Pavan: Search intentions lead to searcher behavior. Fact based search stays organic. Commercial searches tend to be more broad. It also varies by culture. Chinese spend twice as long as Americans.

John mentions that his contention is that the site search queries are the same queries that are being typed into the search engines but they're just not getting to your site.

Is the suggested search condensing the search queries?

Larry: Yes. People are moving to longer queries and that search assist does jump them to the queries that will get them to the answer faster.

Are there differences in lift by categories?

Pavan: Yes there is a difference in lift across different verticals but in all cases it does result in lift.

[Long set up about pretending to be a confused searcher and poor SERPS] What can be done to help confused searchers?

Larry: Search assist is just one way. It works mostly for shorter queries?

Does the golden triangle change with non-roman character sets?

Pavan: In Chinese, the scanning pattern is very different. It's a rectangle. You have to look at everything to put together meaning.

Would you suggest not trying to dominate the organic?

Bill: No, never. Always optimize.

What plays into search assist? How does it affect PPC?

Larry: Nothing is paid in those.

John: The hidden message there is: No you can't spam the suggestions.

John says that the other thing site search is good for is manifesting usability problems and for doing competitive intelligence.

If you rank 1 on a non branded term, should you also be number one in paid search as well?

Bill: That's exactly what our research showed. That said, always test and retest and see if the ROI is worth it. Clicks went 50/50 on paid and organic, so make sure that you're testing and monitoring.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 08/20/08 at 2:10 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Analytics, MSN Search, Pay-Per-Click, SEO Tips & Tricks, SES San Jose 2008, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo, liveblog

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 MSN Search, Microsoft

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, MSN Search, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

June 3, 2008

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 MSN Search, Microsoft, SEM Events, Search Engines, liveblog, smxseattle08

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 to the brand. What kind of faith are you going to instill in stockholders and users when you pair with a company that is already seen as dead in the water?
• They go it alone: It's possible Yahoo will be able to stay out of Microsoft’s clutches and decide to keep on the path they’ve been going. It will be more difficult now that Microsoft has made an offer and publicly stated that they think Yahoo is in need of saving; however, it is possible. If they do go it alone they’ll need to start building out their verticals and conquer the niche market. Really, they’ll just need to start doing something. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time because they’re swallowed up by a bigger, more aggressive fish.

Honestly, it’s really too early to know what’s going to happen with Yahoo. There are so many factors and variables that come into play that there’s no telling what they’ll do. Maybe it will be a completely different company that swoops in to purchase them and save from themselves and others. Whatever happens, it’s going to be a long time before we see any real action, even if some sort of deal were to be made in the next few weeks. So unless you’re a shareholder, let’s try not to freak out too much. Sound good? Okay, then.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/11/08 at 2:44 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in MSN Search, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo

December 4, 2007

Duplicate Content Issues Duplicate Content Issues

I know someone thinks the title of this panel is clever and...okay, it is, but it is also a very mean thing to do to someone as compulsive as I am. I keep wanting to correct it and it's painful to just leave it like that. Duplicate contents hurts more than your rankings, people; please, think of the obsessive compulsives!

Tackling those tricky issues today are representatives from the four major engines: Rahul Lahiri, Ask.com; Derrick Wheeler, Microsoft; Evan Roseman, Google; and Priyank Garg, Yahoo. Aaron Shear moderates.

Aaron introduces Rahul Lahiri first as being from "Ask Jeeves". Rahul is quick to correct him, "Ask.com". Heh. Everyone still misses the butler.

Rahul says he's going to go quickly. Oh dear, I haven't had any coffee yet. This could be a problem.

He begins with the standard definition of duplicate content: Same content on multiple URLs. Why don't search engines like it? It impairs the user experience and consumes resources that could be better served crawling content that's unique. Duplicate content carries a risk of losing valuable votes because your links are spread out over multiple URLs instead of on the expert page. At Ask.com, duplicates are eliminated at all stages: crawling, indexing and ranking.

Contrary to belief, it's not a penalty; it's more similar to not being crawled. It's performed on indexable content, templates aren't included. It's not a concern for supported ccTLDs, like for example a site used in UK only search. (Same web sites on different ccTLDs are okay.)

They filter when the confidence factor is high. They have a low tolerance for false positives.

Some sources of duplicate content:

• Multiple URLs with the same content
• Printer Friendly pages
• Dynamic pages with session IDs/URL variant
• Content syndication
• Localization
• Mirrors

Scraping is the big concern. He asks for a show of hand of people who have had their content scraped--practically the whole room raises their hands.

Duplicate URLs might be necessary for Branding but avoid meaningless parameters and sub-domains if you can.

Rahul urges webmasters to act on the areas that they're in control of, particularly in the area of printer friendly pages. Block Robots from printer friendly pages. Even though many printer friendly pages are quite useable, they're not going to hold visitors because they present no path into the rest of the site. So block it and make sure that the in-site page is the one presented. Aaron asks when you're blocking from printer friendly pages: how do you do it? Rahul says put it in its own folder and robots.txt it out. Otherwise, make sure it's in the head section Meta Robots.

How do you make content unique? He puts up two nearly identical pages with one image name different and one word different in the title. It's nearly impossible for a spider to tell which is the original. Add unique Titles and Meta Descriptions. Add value to syndicated content to make it unique.

All JavaScript pages are a challenge for Ask.

He says you need to make it hard for Scrapers. Mark your territory--use your brand name, use absolute links, host images locally and take legal action when necessary.

If your content gets tossed for duplication, you need to content them for a re-inclusion request.

Evan Roseman is up next. He's going quickly too. Woe.

Why is Google so down on duplicate content? Users don't like it, it uses resources, it uses resources on your server and they're concerned with original authorship --they want it from the person who created it instead of secondhand.

He says URL like a name. Earl. Go ahead and imagine that every time I type it, okay?

Much of what he covers is similar to Rahul. He does point out that www vs non-www is not as much of an issue for Google as before and mentions that you can specify in the webmaster tools. Session IDs and URL parameters can split the PR between them.

Google's goal is to serve one version of the content in search results.

Hmm, interestingly his slide says that dupe content is generally just a filter and it won't destroy your site. I guess that means occasionally it isn't and it will? Now he says it's 'definitely not a penalty'. So which is it? Definitely or generally? Inquiring minds, Evan.

For exact dupes, use a 301, like in the case of tracking URLs and www vs non-www.

For near duplicates, use noindex/robots.txt such as clones of other sites. If you syndicate content, he repeats, make sure you're adding value.

Domains by country:

• Different languages is not duplicate content
• Use unique content specific to the country
• Use different TLDs (also specify in Webmaster Tools) for geo-targeting

Put data which does not affect the substance of the page in a cookie instead of in the URL so that they don't have to try to figure it out. URL parameters are problematic and can cause duplicate content.

What can you do if another site takes your content? Include an absolute URL. If you're syndicating, send out different content than what you keep.

Don’t worry about scrapers or proxies too much, they don't generally (there's that word again) affect your rankings. [Please tell blog search that, they seem to trust everyone else more than the original author.] If you're concerned, file a DCMA against the other site.

You can let them know about any issues at the Webmaster Help Discussion Group

If you're having trouble with your RSS replacing your rankings, let the discussion group know and they'll help.

And then the mics go out, so I get to catch up, yay!

And we're back. Priyank Garg is up next. He skips back about five slides because they're repeats of the other two.

He mentions a few reasons why search engines WOULD want duplicate pages:

• Site restricted queries
• Back ups
• Alternate document formats
• Multiple languages

Some other kinds of duplicate content:
Accidental duplication like session ids in URLs (a URL is a URL is a URL to search engine) and soft 404 errors -- make sure your 404 errors return a 404 error not a 200 okay. [See also our tedious explanation of the same.]

"Dodgy" forms of duplication:
Replicating content across domains unnecessarily
Aggregation of content found elsewhere
Identical content on the same site.

Approximate dupes may be filtered (real estate sites that just change out the city/state.)
Weaving and stitching (mixing and matching phrases, sentences paragraphs, and sections from different sources to create 'new" content) is also duplicate content.

Basically the same tactics work for Yahoo as for the other engines in keeping duplicate content out (robots.txt, meta, 301 dupe pages.) They support wildcards in robots.txt. Site Explorer allows you to Delete URLs or paths from authenticated sites.

Use Robots-nocontent <div>tag on non-relevant parts of the page. The tag can be used to mark templates or syndicated content that's useful in context for the user but not for search engines. (More information on the tag can be found at Ysearchblog.)

Dynamic URL rewriting available: ability to indicate parameters to remove from URLs across the site. Leads to more efficient crawling, better site coverage, more unique content discovered, fewer crawler traps and cleaner URLs that are better for users to read.

The trouble with all these engine specific solutions is that they are engine specific. I like it better when they get together and come up with standards. Sure you can rewrite your URLs just for Yahoo but then where are you in Google?

Last up is Derrick Wheeler. He's adorably brought his own mouse and mouse pad. His job is in house SEO for Microsoft.com but he says that he expects to get questions about Live Search, Office, why things don't work. He doesn't know the answers though, so it won't help.

Aw, today is his one month anniversary with Microsoft. Happy anniversary!
Major accomplishments:

• Signed up for benefits
• Find the cafeterias
• Return to his office without getting lost
• Can finally remember a couple people's names

There are over 27 million pages on Microsoft.com--it took three weeks to discover them all. It's just a little site, really. They've indexed about 7 million of them. In Derrick's view, every duplicate content page is keeping one good page out of the index.

Review your site and make sure that you know what's there. Find duplicate content there before the spiders get there. Know your parameters and which you can drop for search engines. Do a regular crawl report that includes referring URL, fetched URL, redirect path with type, landing URL with status code, Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords. Sort by Title then landing URL and review them for dupes.

Ew! He's got a picture of spiders in a trap. EW.

Detect engines and strip out parameters that you don't need. He doesn't consider that "bad" cloaking. Remove session IDs. Smartpages.com stripped out session IDs and went from 1,000,000 pages indexed to 10,000,000 pages indexed. (A few months later, someone turned them back on and their page count fell. Whoops.)

Look for things that might be causing problems, like dynamic breadcrumbs, related products, etc. They might be helpful for users but you're probably going to get into trouble.

Q&A

Aaron: When you make changes in your rewriting can you fix it easily?

Yahoo: We validate and let you know if there's a failure. The returite starts ttaking effect in the system over a period of time. In the first few months, it's reversible, after that it gets hard.

If I did a 301 to clean this up, how soon do I expect results?

Yahoo: as soon as we start seeing it--a few weeks but it can take a while to percolate
Google: Same thing, as we recrawl, we'll incorporate. Up to a couple months.
Ask: Same.
Microsoft: Derrick's experience is 6 months to a year for full effect if you're 301 to a new site.

If you do a site: command in Google to find www vs. non-www and you come up with different counts, should you 301 the smaller number to the bigger?

Evan: First he wants to emphasize that the site colon estimates are just that, very rough estimates. He wouldn't take them as the golden number. Very very rough. Aside from that, pick whichever form you like better and they'll take it.

Is Google planning on following Yahoo in how their tools are developing?

At Google, we try to do the best we can detecting these things (that Yahoo allows webmasters to correct) automatically. Can't say when or if they'll be following on the allowing webmasters to specify.

Do breadcrumb navigation with a cookie instead of URL parameters. Aaron says that you can detect search engines and strip out parameters. Evan jumps back in to say that Google requests please don't do something special for us. Let us figure it out and if there's a problem contact us.

On what scale do you think Proxy sites (sites entirely duplicated with just a phone number different so they can track PPC calls) will affect your organic results?

Evan: In most cases, they're not outranking the original sites. They're not that popular. We do see them. If they're causing a problem for you, contact Webmaster Help.

What is the line of near-duplicate/duplicate?
Evan: I think you're looking at it from the wro9ng direction. Create unique, useful content and you'll be fine. [The room laughs. That requires work!]

Derrick: It's like the Supreme Court decision on obscenity; you know it when you see it.

Can I report copyright issues through the spam channels?

Priyank: Spam is more subjective. The DCMA is the right channel.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 12/ 4/07 at 1:02 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in Ask, Blogging, Google, MSN Search, Microsoft, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, pubcon07

September 27, 2007

Live.com Re-Released, Actually Relevant Now

Quick! Microsoft just rolled out a new and improved version of Live.com and TechMeme is on fire! It’s just so beautiful to watch.

Yes, Microsoft held its big Searchification event yesterday and the bloggers are all in a tizzy. There was even liveblogging by Vanessa and Todd. (Wait – There was liveblogging and no one called me? Am I not pretty enough for you people?)

I wasn’t at the event, but it's okay (I guess). There is plenty of coverage. So much coverage, in fact, that it’s somewhat hard to figure out what’s important, who’s just biased and what’s sounding a little too much like a press release.

Here’s what I think you should know.

• An Actually Relevant Index: For me, this is the biggest improvement of them all. The new Live.com index is now four times as big as the old one. Sweet! I did some standard query testing to try things out, and I have to admit, the results are decent. I’d even go as far as to call them “relevant” and maybe even “useful”. Microsoft revealed that they’ve incorporated more clickstream data to help the ranking and relevancy process. Things are looking good, guys. Congrats!
• Deeper Verticals: We mentioned the kick ass new version of MSN Video yesterday, and the guys from Redmond aren’t stopping there. Microsoft is making “deep investments” in the areas of entertainment, shopping, health and local. Why? Because, according to their numbers, 40 percent of searches fall into these categories. Their investment includes creating special results pages for queries related to these verticals, along with health and local. These “special pages” will give users a comprehensive overview of the topic, using blended search elements like images, reviews, ratings, and maps.
• Better Rich Answers: The new version of Live Search will include a revamped Answers platform that will give users instant responses to queries related to weather, images, celebrities and entertainment, sports, stocks, Yellow Pages, maps or quick facts. It doesn’t seem quite as in depth or impressive as Ask’s offering, but still, nice.
• Another Rebranding?: I haven’t heard this anywhere else, but Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft still isn’t sold in this whole “Live” thing. I guess they find it just as silly as they rest of us. Live Search General Manager Derrick Connell told Mary Jo that Microsoft continues to look at how they can improve branding. Perhaps a new name is in the works?
• Dedicated to Fall/Spring Release Schedule: Microsoft will stick to its Spring/Fall release schedule for every year Live continues to exist (that sounds promising, eh?). The upcoming spring release will involve enhancements around community. I guess we’ll hear more about that once the flowers start blooming. [Hands up on people who actually think they'll make that schedule? --Susan] Shh, don’t kill their buzz.

And that’s everything you need to know about the new release in a nut shell. Microsoft is getting a lot of press right now and I keep hearing about how they’re “equal to Google”. First of all, I don’t think that’s true. Is Microsoft better than it was a year ago? Sure, but it’s still not in the same league as Google. And quite frankly, no one, not even Google, is doing blended search as well as Ask.com.

And even if they were as good as Google (whatever that really means), it wouldn’t be “good enough”. Google has the brand, Microsoft doesn’t. In order for users to trust them, they’d have to be light years ahead of Google, and they’re not there with this release. They did a great job of increasing the size and relevancy of their index, they did some funky things with their maps, added some new features, but I haven’t seen anything that is really different. So far it’s just been catch up. Needed catch up but catch up all the same.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 09/27/07 at 12:12 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in MSN Search

September 26, 2007

Yahoo Podcasts, MSN Video, & Google Video Alerts? Oh, My!

Yahoo Closes Down Podcasting Site

This made me kind of sad, but Read/WriteWeb reports that Yahoo will be closing down its 2-year-old podcasting directory effective October 31. Bummer. As the screenshot depicts, Yahoo doesn’t give any information regarding why they’re closing down the site, they simply offer an apology and expiration date.

There’s been talk that the reason for the closure may be that they’re revamping their entertainment offerings (Yahoo Music, Yahoo TV, etc), and perhaps podcasting will be included in that. Frankly, the site could use a little clean up. The currently podcasting directory isn’t altogether user-friendly. There weren’t any RSS feeds and users were forced to log in with a Yahoo ID in order to download any of the content. Hopefully, we’ll see a fresh launch sometime soon, or at least I’m going to go ahead and keep telling myself that. The podcasting audience is just starting to grow; I’d hate to see Yahoo miss out on an excellent opportunity to reach people. We’ll see what happens next.

Microsoft Rolls Out A (Much, Much) Better Video Search

Microsoft released a new version of its MSN Video site, hoping it provide a better experience for both users and advertisers. R/WW’s Marshall Kirkpatrick took a look and called it the video site of the future, adding that it’s not pretty, but it is something you need to check out.

Why is it the video site of the future? Because MSN is implementing a new time-based advertising system that will deliver ads based on the amount of time a user spends viewing, not how many clips they watched. The idea is that advertisers will be able to insert an ad at set time intervals, perhaps every 5 minutes or so. I’m not so sure about this. My thought would be that if I’m trying to watch a long video and you’re inserting an ad every 10 minutes, well, I’m probably not going to stay very long. I’m most likely going to get highly agitated and then go blog about it. That may just be me.

And I’m inclined to disagree with Marshall over the attractiveness of the site. I don’t really remember what the old site looked like, but I happen to think the new site is quite pretty. Its openness encourages readers to browse through Microsoft’s video catalog and engage with the site. Also neat is the split screen format Microsoft is using so that users can view one video while still browsing for something better. Ah, it’s my type of video viewing.

Google Alerts Get Video

Google is making it easy for users to track interesting video content with the release of new video Google Alerts. Now you can keep tabs on videos about the things important to you the same you do with Web, news and blog content. I set one up for Bruce this morning and found some interesting videos that I hadn’t seen before. Good stuff!

Fun Finds

Performancing had a good post about learning how to blow your own horn. It seems that sometimes this modesty thing ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. I rule.

ResourceShelf lets us know that the Google/DoubleClick hearing will take place tomorrow (Thursday) and that search nerds can listen to it live online. Ooo! I’ll be listening, will you?

Posted by Lisa Barone on 09/26/07 at 5:23 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Branding, Design, Google, MSN Search, Microsoft, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo

August 20, 2007

Universal & Blended Search

It’s time for this morning’s Universal & Blended Search session. In case you’re confused, “blended search” is what they call Universal Search when it's by anyone but Google. All caught up? Good.

Chris Sherman is moderating the session with Greg Jarboe (SEO-PR), Sherwood Stranieri (Catalyst Online), Bill Slawksi (Commerce360), David Bailey (Google), Erik Collier (Ask.com) and Tim Mayer (Yahoo) speaking.

Greg Jarboe is up first and calls Google Universal Search (GUS) the biggest thing to hit search since the Florida update. This means that even if you are new to the search sphere you’re not at any kind of competitive disadvantage to the old dinosaurs who have been doing this for years and years (like Bruce!).

Greg shows the audience the effect GUS has had on the search results with a few screenshots.

He notes that back on June 29 (aka the day after my birthday) if you did a search for [iphone], you would have noticed that the fourth result in Google was a News Result with an Apple-created YouTube video in the 8th position. Greg polls the audience on whether they thought Apple’s nicely planted YouTube video was intentional and a sign that Apple understands Universal or if it was just a happy accident. Personally, I think it was just a fluke, but then again, I’m bitter.

Since images are appearing in Google results, Greg says that site owners must absolutely start optimizing their images to appear in the engines, especially images for key executives. You don’t want a photo of your CEO and his girlfriend to appear on the front page of a user’s SERP, or at least not until his divorce is final.

More examples of GUS in action:

• A search for [Hillary Clinton] yesterday showed a News result ranked at number 4, with YouTube videos, blog posts and three totally unflattering photos appearing below the fold. Greg blames the unflattering photos on the right wing conspiracy (heh), but then says we can’t quote him on that. Oh well, already did.
• A search for [hurricane dean] shows News results are ranked number one, with a myriad of blog listings at the bottom of the page. He predicts in the next few days we’ll begin seeing images and videos because that’s the stuff users are going to be looking for. Because we like looking at pictures of destroyed stuff.

What does all of this mean? It means that all the rules of search have been rewritten. Universal search changes what appears in the “golden triangle”.

Search remains the number one way journalists obtain additional information for a story. If you’re not optimizing your press releases for search engines, please come to the Bruce Clay Simi Valley headquarters next week so that I may kick you. I promise it won’t be too hard, just enough to leave a mark. Media relations should be focused on the top Google News sources. Google News Report and Newsknife will both tell you which news media optimizes their results better.

Always include a JPG with your news release, as 90 percent of journalists say that visuals are somewhat or very important to them. Even better, an image acts as the eye candy that will catch readers' attention and make them click on your story. This means that even if you’re sitting at position four, your story is far more likely to be read than the story positioned at number one with no photo.

Something else to keep in mind is that though Google doesn’t incorporate video into Google News right now, a recent interview hints that they’re working on it and it probably won’t be too long before we start to see it.

Greg talks a bit about using social mapping tools to help identify the most influential bloggers in your niche (ME!). With millions of bloggers out there, it’s important to pitch your stories to the influential ones. Who cares what the Susan Esparzas think about you anyway?

A few years ago there was a panel at SES that discussed how the vertical creep was being ignored by searchers and search marketers. You can’t afford to do this today. You cannot ignore Universal Search. Google is making specialized and vertical content more visible through Universal Search, and it will act as a huge boom to those who pay attention to news, video, image and blog search. What Universal Search does it take the different verticals (silos) and slides them together. Your company needs to start collaborating.

Up next is Sherwood Stranieri to talk about apples, oranges and Universal Search. Mmm, oranges. (Apparently I am unable to spell “oranges” today. It’s only day one and my brain is already fried. This can’t be good.)

Sherwood notes that Universal Search compiles results from multimedia and news resources in order to create a single search results page for consumers. There are a few variations on the theme. There is the Ask3D approach which divides results into sections (Microsoft and Yahoo do something similar. [Yeah – only theirs sucks]), and then there is Google which stacks everything into a merged list.

Sherwood mimics Greg’s earlier statement and says that blended search changes the game. He even goes as far as to call Google the “game changer” because it’s the format most disruptive to the status quo. [I’m sorry, but since when does “disruptive” equal “game changing”? If anyone is changing the status quo (and for the better) it is Ask.com. Google is barely even implementing Universal Search right now.

Fine, Lisa rant over.]

Sherwood focuses his presentation around Google’s Universal Search and Video.

Previously, video had been spread virally, but now it’s in search so we have to start looking at it. How does GUS compare videos and text-based pages? Do conventional search engine optimization ranking factors come into play (indexability, content, linking)? What about metrics like views or comments? These are all things we have to look at.

[Sidenote: It’s really distracting to me that everyone keeps referring to Google Universal Search as GUS. I’m waiting for this really hip, game-changing guy named Gus to be carried through the door at any second. (Will he be played by Dule Hill? --Susan)]

To determine how Google is ranking video, Sherwood created a test subject out of its client A&E Television. A&E has thousands of video clips across three TV channel sites. Many rank in Google currently, some authorized, some pirated. Putting the pirating issue aside for a moment (arrrrgh), Sherwood and his team looked at how the video content was actually ranking.

He uses the creepy show as his example:

GUS Page 1:
Page 1 shows a healthy mix of videos and conventional Web listings.
Data was collected for page 1 videos, as well as Web page listings on pages 1 and 2
Both search engine optimization-specific and video-specific stats

Sherwood examined the videos that were ranking for the Criss Angel query and examined the traditional search engine optimization ranking factors like PageRank numbers, incoming links, keyword phrases. Everything looking the same regardless of where the video ranked.

From there, he looked at just the video factors, things like the number of views, comments, tags, etc. He determined that the number of views a video gets definitely contributes to its ranking, but that wasn’t the complete picture. Not surprisingly, in order for a video to rank well, it takes the combination of search engine optimization factors AND video factors. It is the mix that determines placement.

It makes sense that it’s not just the number of views that will cause a video to rank high because otherwise the SERP would be clogged with old videos and the new stuff would never get a chance. Also, you have to think that Google can use tools like Google Hot Trends to determine whether a video is hot and therefore deserves to be ranking.

There are a few loose ends.

• Video statistics themselves (Google can read the number of views and comments).
  For Google to be able to add in the video metrics, it needs to be able to recognize the info on the page. Dan Crow from Google Crawl Systems presented information indicating that it can.
  Google has to warm up for the indexing on one of these Video portal sites.
• Bad News: This is why there are only a few portals are in GUS.
• Good News: It is likely video factors are being read into the equation.

Next up is Bill Slawski who I met last night for the first time. Huzzah!

Bill comments that he doesn’t see Universal Search as a revolutionary process, instead he thinks of it more as an evolutional (I’m with Bill). It’s only evident if you’re looking for it.

Bill pulled up a search for [spider] on the four major engines to see what the results looked like. Google and Yahoo had 10 blue links, Microsoft had 10 blue links and some images, Ask.com, of course, totally rocked.

He talks about Google’s Universal Search patent and how it originally suggested that Google would list alternative results in the right hand side where the ads currently are. Obviously, this isn’t the Universal Search we’re seeing now but it was the prototype back then.

Bill again comments that Universal Search is like an evolution. The timeline going something like this:

Infoseeks’ blended search (1995) > Vertical Creeps into Organic Search > OneBox Results and UI Experiments > Universal Search.

From here Bill gets very technical. I tried to follow along but he’s (a) way smarter than me and (b) he talks fast. Here’s what I could pick up:
Log Data is collected and organized as triples (u=user info, q=query info, r=information about repositories). This info varies based on the country, language, time of day, etc. You want to learn how to rank really well in this specific vertical and try to rank for what people are searching for. That's how you get into Universal Search.

He comments that Yahoo also had some old patents that discussed blended search. They talked about using labels to personalize results. It didn't use terms like tagging, user annotations, though.
How does the information get from a Web page to an index? If you want to rank for a definition you want to make sure you include the words “definition” or “glossary” on the top of the page. You want to make sure it’s easy to distinguish one set of definitions from another.

One of the motivations of providing Universal Search is to enhance the user experience and to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. It changes search engine optimization a bit. Why should someone come to your Web page if they get the answer straight from the SERP? Bill says chances are if a user finds something interesting, they’ll click through to the rest of your site.

Next we hear from the engines themselves. Each rep gets 5 minutes.

Up first is Dave Bailey from Google. Hey Dave.

He reminds us of Google’s mission statement to organize the world’s info. He thinks Universal Search is just an extension of that mission. Google wants users to have a single search box to rely on and to get results for anything they’d like. Why just one box? Because people have busy lives. I mean, some of us have to cover 16 SES sessions in 3.5 days. Google doesn’t expect you to remember about all of their different verticals.

There are also certain pages out there that are special. He uses the query [arctic butterfly sensor cleaner] as an example. (What? You totally search for that everyday, don’t you?)
There’s a OneBox up a top with product results and then a YouTube video about how to use it lower.

If you search for [origami crane], you see images at the top of the results, plus a MetaCafe video. A search for [Cranston RI] brings up a map from Google Local.

What Google is doing with Universal Search is digging deeper to find relevant results and then using smarter ranking techniques to determine where the media belongs on the page. Does the video belong at the top of the page or does it below lower down?

A query comes in and Google sends it everywhere. Each vertical does it best to determine how they should handle the query. Do we want to include blogs? How are the books results?

What does it mean to search engine optimization?

Dave must be on another planet because he says it will be business as usual. He assures us that things aren’t changing as radically as some SEOs think they are. Web results will always dominate the page and many universal results are just Web results anyway.

However, do think about creating quality content in other forms. Create useful video content, include images, enhance your Google Local listing, upload product listings to Google Product, etc.

Up next is Tim Mayer to show some of things Yahoo has launched recently.

Tim says if you cover up the logo it’s difficult to differentiate one search engine from another (um, it is?). He says Yahoo is moving to a better optimized user experience. It’s about getting the best result from the Web in the number one spot.

Recently launched Yahoo features:

• Music Artists Shortcuts – Go to official page, hear clips, get lyrics, etc. It’s very different from previous years where the purpose of the SERP was to send the users off as quickly as possible. Here, Yahoo is encouraging interaction.
• Movie Shortcut – Show times, Reviews, Trailers, etc
• Hotel Shortcut Inline – Blends the additional content with traditional results courtesy of an expand arrow.
• Consumer Electronics Shortcut: People want to buy a camera but they don’t know which one. Yahoo offers suggestions, most popular brands, most popular products, to help them narrow their search. Clickthrough rate is very high because users are exploring the topic and looking for help.

Next up is Eric Collier from Ask.com. Before he starts, I just want you to know that my toes are frozen. Yes, I’m done whining.

He shows the audience the Ask 3D interface. The point was to highlight the vertical content more because users weren’t taking advantage of it. They also want to get as much above the fold as possible and get users their answers as quickly as possible.

He explains the 3 panels of the new Ask interface:

On the left hand site you have the search box (complete with search suggestions) and the Narrow/Expand your search options. In the middle you have the Smart Answers and organic search results. On the right rail is really where they get into blended search.

Types of content sources include encyclopedia, blogs, television, narrow your search, search suggestions, health, video, music, etc.

How has this changed user behavior?

Ask has seen a huge jump in user satisfaction, a 30 percent drop in users clicking through to the second SERP, 15 percent drop in users sessions with more than one search. Users really are coming and getting what they want in that first page of results.

What should search marketers expect?

• A larger percentage of SERPs with blended results.
• User location will play a larger role in SERPs.
• Expect to see fewer web results in the SERPs (I agree, which is why I didn’t agree with Brian’s assertion that Universal is “business as usual” for search engine optimization).
• Blogs, images and videos will take online reputation into account when ranking.
• Pay attention to other search drivers – Search suggestions, related search, etc.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 08/20/07 at 3:09 PM | Comments (4)
See more entries in Ask, Google, MSN Search, SEM Events, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, sessanjose2007

June 5, 2007

Penalty Box Summit

After a break and a yummy cupcake, we're back for our first Organic Search Engine Optimization session. Danny Sullivan is our moderator for today's Penalty Box Summit. Speakers today are Peter Linsley (Ask.com), Aaswath Raman (Microsoft Live Search), Tim Mayer (Yahoo) and Matt Cutts (Google).

Danny and the panel put on hockey masks (because it's about penalties, geddit?) I cheer for the Ducks and inadvertently set off Danny's rant about Orange County sports teams. Whoops. (Go, Ducks!)

Okay, back on topic--Danny explains that we're going to be focused on improving the general level of understanding and applying penalties, not dealing with single site issues.

Tim Mayer is up first.

Tim comments first on an unfortunate misquoting of Yahoo's commitment to search. Guess what? They're really committed to it and they feel personalization is an important part. It was "unfortunate and [they're] obviously very committed to search". It's okay to be shocked.

He emphasizes that spam is about INTENT with which you use techniques and the EXTENT to which you use a technique rather than the specific technique you use. There are legitimate uses for almost every technique. IP cloaking for geographic targeting, for example. The important thing is be smart about it. Use it to help, not hurt, user experience.

The acceptable line varies by industry, some categories are more competitive. If you're doing optimization, you should be appropriate for your industry. [Susan's Hint: You can use the SEOToolset and Free Tools to get a baseline on your competitors.]

Tim says that he has a link internally that can report a quality problem in the index. Webmasters can report spam through Site Explorer. About 70% of the spam reports they receive through the tool are legitimate spam, the rest is just noise. The tool also allows you to report spammy in-links so that you don't get penalized by association.

Tim refers people to the Webmaster Resources. Come on, Tim. This is the advanced crowd. We already have those memorized. He goes on to discuss what to do for a re-inclusion request. Tell them "this is what I think I was penalized for, this is what I've done to clean it up." They'll review it pretty quickly.

Peter Linsley is up next. They just launched the new Ask.com last night. "For you livebloggers, go check it out". Not right now, Peter. I'm blogging. ;)

Peter talks fast. Here we go:

Candidates for penalty are: hurting the user experience and gaming the search engine. Areas for penalty are links and content.

Gaming includes: Cloaking, Keyword Stuff, hidden text, link farms, scraper sites--basically all SEO Spam 101.

Hurting the user experience includes: Dead pages, no content, dynamic content. Pages that are different every time damage the user experience. Pages with no utility at all are hurting the user experience.

Warning signs of a penalty: drops in traffic, drops in rankings (duh.)

Don't let the spammers leverage your site. If you have a blog, moderate your comments, don't publish your access logs, etc.

Re-inclusion requests are looked at case by case.

Peter mentions sneaky JavaScript re-directs which are the most irritating in the world.

...wow, you should see the CAPTCHA he just put up. It's a math equation and there is not enough caffeine in the WORLD. I'm sure that Matt looked at it was all like 'Oh, that's EASY.' Whatever, Matt. The point is, make sure you have a way to keep out the spammers. Don't let them abuse you.

Aaswath Raman is up next. He's going to review guidelines, why they use penalties, how they handle them and blah

He repeats what Tim said about spam being about intent and targeting the search engine for gaming.

Example: starwarsactionfigures.com links to starwars.com (okay) but also to cheapcasinohandbags.org (suspicious). So they evaluate to see if it's just an affiliate or if this is a case of trying to game the engines.

On the page level -- being useless to users (strings of keywords, etc) is cause for penalty

On the link level -- in-links from bad neighborhoods and out-links to suspicious pages

On a general level -- Deceiving users through redirects and misleading information

Suspicious or spammy behavior may cause a ranking penalty. More blatant or harmful spamming could be cause for de-listing. It's like a venial or mortal sin--one means a single Hail Mary, the other send you to hell. That's my analogy, not Aaswath's.

webspam@microsoft.com is their email. They are working on better ways to improve their ways of getting feeding. All de-listed sites are automatically reviewed.

Matt Cutts is up last. He's going to read a list of spammers. This should be FUN!

He says he was going to do a "you might be a spammer" joke. "If you've left 10000 comments..." but he thinks that we probably already know what spam is. Yes, Matt, we do.

If you can keep someone from spamming because there are better ways to make money, that's the way to go but really, there will always be spam. So they try to counter it. They want to make the user experience as good as it can possibly be.

They alert webmasters that they might be having issues so that they can take action and correct the problem. When that happens, they can do a re-inclusion request and everyone's happy.

Yesterday, Pat asked why the guidelines were so brief (You&A with Matt Cutts). As a result, the webmaster guidelines were beefed up LAST NIGHT. Good Lord, Googlers, don't you ever sleep? Oh wait, it's been in the works for a while. Wow, they're all linked to a specific page on the actual issue. Yay, time for more dissection.

Matt likes that the new pages are written so they don’t automatically assume that you're a bad guy. They explain how things can be interpreted as spam. The whole webmaster guidelines silo is much bigger and deeper now. Cool.

There are a lot of Googlers whose job it is to get feedback. Matt mentions Vanessa Fox and Adam Lasnik, specifically. These are the people you should mob if Matt is busy.

If someone reports off-topic porn, they want action now, so google reserves the right to do manual edits but by and large they want to take care of things algorithmically. Matt doesn't say that he thinks there needs to be a scalable and robust solution but I know he's thinking it.

They send out emails in 10 languages to try to help keep people in the loop if their site is in trouble. They distinguish between types of webmasters (as he said yesterday) and they do treat them differently. Mom and Pop shops that have trouble will get alerts so that they can fix it. They're not really spending too much time on the serial spammers who know full well what they're doing.

There's a leveling off of keyword importance. Once is good, twice is better, 900 times you're past that importance threshold and you're probably looking spammy.

Matt says that as a search engine, they want a clean index, not just clean scoring (of pages).

Matt discusses the trouble a while back with people sending out fake emails spoofed to look like they were from Google. Email is not authenticated. Someone was sending out the fake emails with an .exe. Google will not do that. He wants to look into how they can authenticate their communications to prevent this from happening again.

They're going to change the name of the re-inclusion request to something like a reconsideration request. They'll take into account the kind of webmaster you are. If you're clearly a novice, you're going to get a little more leeway than if you're a hardcore SEO. This whole crowd is screwed.

Danny promises to show us how Search Engine Land is spamming. There's a CSS hidden text or something. This whole thing was confusing to me. The SELand logo is actually their background. He tries to get the text cache from Live Search, they don't have one. He tries to get it from Google but they have a bug. He finally gets a text cache somehow and tries to show us the hidden text...but it's hidden. This is SO AWESOME. They have a note in their CSS file that says 'we're not spamming, well we are but suck it up for another week until we fix it'.

Enough about Danny's spamming, let's move on to other spamming. What would people like to see? Should it be a free for all? Should it be tighter? Should it be like that new search engine with the Hawaiian name and be manual?

Q&A Highlights

If I mention your question without mentioning your name, comment and I'll edit. I can't see everyone from here.

Why is Penn State being ranked for Buy Viagra (because they've been hacked, not because Penn State wants to sell Viagra)? How come Google isn't better about manually banning this kind of spamming?

Heh, Matt just said scalable and robust again. It's his new phrase. They typically refer to take an algorithmic approach to removing spam but he thinks there's room for using humans in a 'scalable' way.

Tim chimes in to agree that humans can be 'scalable'. Aaswath says that ultimately the fix for Viagra spam will have to be algorithmic. Peter agrees and says that people could work every day for the next 10000 years and not even touch the amount of cleaning they'd have to do to fix the Viagra problem.

Danny does a quick tour of the SEs. Ask does well, Live doesn't have any .edu links (Tim: But they're not relevant! Danny: At least on the others I can buy Viagra.) Speaking of Yahoo, they have an .edu 404 page as their second result. Oh, now we're going to that Hawaiian named engine. AHAHAHA. They're not relevant and the ones that are come from .edus. I love this session!

Real estate, travel, home schooling... Different industries have different levels of normal. Link rules in real estate are different because reciprocal links are more common so they're looking at that.

The search engines look at a larger set of queries so their 'we're doing well' isn't always the webmaster's 'doing well'.

Someone wants penalties to be announced. Don't just penalize them, announce it and say they did something wrong. Lots of the audience agrees. Even more want a way to look up a way to see if their site has a penalty or not. Matt says 'yeah, that'd be great but then you also tell the spammers which techniques are still working'. Tim reiterates, they don't want to clue people in to what tricks are being missed by the engines.

Pat (feedthebot.com) wants the ability to know that his site is definitively under a penalty. How do I do a re-inclusion requests that actually get results?

Matt: We take them very seriously. Some people think you have to admit guilt but they're trying to soften the message a little. You don't have to grovel but you do have to try to be honest. If you don't know but you fixed some stuff, tell them.

Open-sourcing the resolution process says Michael Martinez (I think?). Danny calls it 'wikispamia'. Matt says having other people vouch might be interesting but there would always be someone out there try to game the system. He mentions that Neil Patel has 30 digg aliases, by way of an example.

Danny says there needs to be a way to say 'this wasn't an intent to deceive but I'm getting penalized anyway.'

In a discussion about DUI laws and how to build pages to explain them, Matt calls Wyoming unimportant. Then he has to bribe people with Google Webmaster t-shirts to not tell Wyoming about it. I didn't get a t-shirt so I'm blogging it anyway. (I wouldn't except that I'm bitter because they're supercute long sleeved and black! There's a heart on the sleeve!)

Danny says rather than monopolizing the engine reps for twenty minutes, give them a business card with the site on it so they can check it later. Matt chimes in and says that you can write it up ahead of time too. They like that.

Quick requests from the audience:

--We should be able to report spam in the SERP not in a separate form.
--Please let us know you at least got the message. It feels like sending messages in to a void.
--Full list of the actual penalties.
--Get more input from the webmaster about the site.
--Trusted webmasters (Lots of applause for that)
--Clean site badge.
--Trust API through Webmaster Tools
--Max Keywords per tag (Danny: Don't use the tags. Et tu, Danny?)
--Stop being afraid of spammers and provide more transparency.
--Better train your ad reps.
--Ban Viagra (Danny: just give it away! You can afford it!)
--Details on time penalty
--Negative rank on the toolbar
--Caution about banning the entire servers
--Bad neighbor API (Danny calls that silly talk)

Last words:

Aaswath: We love you.
Tim: Give us feedback on features in site explorer. It's digg-like.
Matt: We love you infinity times infinity, especially Wyoming. We're trying to improve communication. Keep talking to us.
Peter: We love the feedback. At the end of the day, we just want to provide good results.

Awesome session.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/ 5/07 at 12:22 PM | Comments (3)
See more entries in Ask, Google, MSN Search, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo, smxseattle07

June 4, 2007

Keynote Conversation with Satya Nadella

Almost done with day one, folks. Don’t wimp out on me now.

It’s time for introducti -- oh, no! Danny just introduced Satya as a “15-year-old” instead of a “15-year veteran”. Smooth, Danny. In case you don’t know, Satya Nadell is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s new Search & Advertising Platform Group.

When talking about Microsoft, Satya says that there’s a lot of fire and desire in Microsoft’s teams to do stuff and to contribute. The question they’re facing right now is how do they go from where they are and show that innovation. He says that in some ways, Microsoft has very little to lose. (Did he really just say that? They can’t be the right attitude.)

Satya speaks about Microsoft’s Search & Advertising Platform group and says there is logic in bringing the ad and search sides together because there’s a lot they can do together. The fact that Microsoft has a full page that has to be relevant to users’ means there’s plenty of room for integration. Bringing the engineering teams together is something Microsoft is focusing on.

[Good heavens. Satya talks faster than Michael Gray. How am I supposed to keep up with this? And at the end of the day, no less.]

Danny: What do you see as the biggest challenge you have to deal with?

Satya responds that at some level when you are 10 percent share in the US, you’re forced to face up and realize that that’s the challenge. How do you grow that share so that advertisers are getting more eyeballs? How do you make a present a better search experience so that advertisers want to associate with you?

If you look at the total number of unique searchers using Microsoft, Satya says its approximately 55 million unique searchers a month. That’s about 50 percent of what Google has. That’s not bad. He says that Microsoft has over 500 million users worldwide. That’s a lot of users. They want to crack the code and figure out how to keep those searches. That’s where you’ll see them do a lot of experimentation.

Overall, being able to really get contextual search around the entire Microsoft network and increase engagement is perhaps job number one.

Danny: How do you do some of the distinguishing between Google, Yahoo or Ask?

Satya says it takes a lot to be in the search business. He feels like if you think about the sophistication of the Microsoft platform they’ve finally reached a level of maturity, a level of investment.

Danny: How do you differentiate? You realize there’s something beyond the page with ten blue links.

Satya says 3D is where Microsoft differentiates itself. They think that 3D Web will happen. It’s great for new advertising and for mapping locations. Microsoft also has a rich mobile application.

He says they’re trying to get high share in some of the verticals. He repeats his “when you’re only at 10 percent share” mantra and says verticals are a priority. Satya doesn’t think he’s in the search game only to win or get their fair share in the verticals. He wants to do both, but at the same time they feel they have the leadership in some of those verticals and they’re going to take it.

On the ad side, he talks about last year’s launch of adCenter and comments that Microsoft is pretty happy with it. The thing they mostly want to focus on right now is based on the feedback they’ve received. They want to improve the quality and the usability of adCenter. They’re going to put a lot of emphasis on basic usability. They’ve also been doing interesting things at adlabs.microsoft.com.

Danny asks Satya about Microsoft’s recent acquisition of aQuantive and asks if that isn’t a conflict of interest.

Satya says Microsoft definitely wants to keep them. If you think about it, he says, aQuantive has cracked the code on this one. It’s fair to say there will be a different lens with Microsoft involved, but they intend to make sure that the flexibility Avenue A has to service their clients remains. The fact that Microsoft is publisher and has a technology arm won’t affect the way things are run. The clients of Avenue A can be assured that Avenue A will have all the same policies to protect their interests.

Changing focus, Satya says that at the end of the day, MSN is where all of Microsoft’s traffic is. They have to keep pace on MSN as a portal. That defines everything. You’ll also see them innovate with the Windows experience.

Danny asks Satya how he prepared himself for his new role at Microsoft.

Satya says the best way to really energize yourself late in your career is to jump into something new. Hell yeah, Satya! He says the past month has been really refreshing for him. His job is to take Microsoft’s friction and enable their team to do their best work.

Microsoft’s long term dream is to create the best search interface and provide the best search results for a given query. We’re in the first phases of search innovation, he says.

During the Q&A, one attendee asks if Microsoft would extend financial rewards to users who promise to use Microsoft search.

Satya laughs and says he’ll ask his boss. Hee.

Danny asks Satya if there are any glimmerings of pause for their mapping service after the privacy concerns that arose after Google’s released its street level view.

Satya says it’s something they’ll track. At the end of the day, you have to ask how much you want to put the users in control. If users feel that having the imagery outweighs the privacy concerns, we’ll listen. But if the privacy concerns are paramount, then you’ll see us find some kind of equilibrium.

Danny: In the past month, we’ve seen Google Universal Search come out. What’s Microsoft’s take on that?

The short answer is that Microsoft is working on it. They really believe in taking advantage of full page real estate. There’s a page architecture that’s evolving the same way Google’s is.

When asked why users should use Live.com he responds because there is an aggregation of a lot of features. Search is one of those real universal things. Every query is different. Every searcher has a different need at a different time.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 06/ 4/07 at 6:30 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in MSN Search, Pay-Per-Click, smxseattle07

Inside the Auction Black Box

Last session today for me. Once again, our moderator is the talented Jeff Rohrs, whose name I misspelled at least twice earlier today. Joshua Stylman of Reprise Media, Jonah Stein of Alchemist Media and Dan Sundgren of Efficient Frontier will be our panelists this session. Jonah is stepping in for Jesse Stricchiola who is out sick. These fabulous lads will be explaining to our audience of experienced PPC gurus and one very confused blogger exactly what goes on inside the paid search auction. My wrists hurt so we'll hope that things are succinct.

We've got a couple minutes here while they deal with some sound issues. Yay, a break!

Dan Sundgren is up first. He starts off with a quote from David Ogilvy emphasizing how your job as a marketer can add just as much to the product as any

Quality score inherently is about being obsessed with being user experience. Google's success is based on doing good for the user and the quality score is there way of feeding into that.

To really understand quality score, you need to understand that Google built it to reward a good user experience. He believes that Google will try to put less and less ads on the page, trying to give people what they want, making things cleaner, simpler. It's counter-intuitive but so is Google.

It's extra important now to understand Quality Score because as Google grows in ad spaces (video, tv, radio, print) they're going to extend their auctions to those areas too. The evolution of paid search is toward better user experience and better return. From CPM to CTR and now to CPA.

Doubleclick and Google Analytics have made Quality Score based on more than just CTR. Landing pages quality is a component.

AdRank is the formula Google uses to figure out where an ad should be placed on a page. Google likes fairness, they want the little guy to have a chance to play in the same space as the big guys because the competition is better for business all the way around.

The minimum bid on a keyword changes based on the general quality score for that word. A better quality score can get you higher up in the paid results without paying more per click.

"Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon." - David Ogilvy. Dan emphasizes that it's important to drill down. Don't accept surface answers. It's a complicated question.

Josh Stylman is up next. He's going to cover the other quality score engines: Microsoft and Yahoo. He mentions he's got some differences of opinions here, so this should be interesting. Summer 2005 was when Google introduced the idea of a Quality Score.

Quality score philosophy is about Punishment with Google and Reward from Microsoft and Yahoo. Google will raise cost for low quality and will deactive ads that are too low. MS and Y don't ask quite the same premium. It's on average $1.00 more with Google and only $.10 and $.08 with Yahoo and Microsoft.

Part of the trouble of course is that Google has a 65% market share. You have to play with them and that means they can charge more. It's a premium that you pay to be in the space. By comparison, the lower costs in the other engines reflect their attempts to attract advertisers to them so that they can attract distribution and gain market share.

Google uses many more data points than the other two. In Yahoo and MSN, you really only have to worry about CPC keyworded-targeted text ads. It's easier to figure out pieces of the blackbox. MSN offers day-parting and demographics, both of which are justification for getting advertisers to increase their CPCs. It's not necessarily a bad thing, if it's worth it.

Editorial review can be hit and miss. Because it's human, there's not always a logical pattern to what gets rejected and approved. Josh would like to see more automation there.

What defines relevancy? You can make the CTR higher and kill your conversion rate. It's possible to make sure that everyone wins but you need balance and make sure that there is actually conversation going on.

Jonah Stein is going to be covering CPA. He doesn't have case studies, since the program is fairly new. What is Pay per action? It's an experimental model, Google as a super affiliate. You only pay when something happens. It's a nice risk free model and you never leave prospects on the table. Not only that it's better on click fraud.

On the other hand...you're sharing the value of the customer with Google. They get to know how much you think your customer is worth. It distorts the web, turning everyone into a marketing site. And it can increase costs overall as more advertisers get into the space. It turns Adsense publishers into affiliate channels.

The ultimate danger is that it turns Google into everyone's Silent (or not so Silent) Partner. Aaron Wall calls it Google's invisible hand--you have to be willing to share a lot of information with them in order to get the best results. They already collect a huge amount of data through a huge variety of channels. Jonah lists them; it takes two slides. I'm pretty sure I see Rebecca writing them all down so check with her later on if you're interested.

Looking ahead: PPA is here to stay. It's too soon to know the ROI but the biggest threat here is to affiliate players--Google is cutting into that business model.

Q&A highlights:

How do misspellings and synonyms work if they aren't on your landing page? Josh: Structure them at the campaign structure level. GYM anticipates that savvy marketers will buy those keywords and you won't necessarily be penalized for them. Jonah: You're not necessarily going to get a bad quality score for ads with misspellings. Dan: Did You Mean is really good piece that people are using more and more.

(My battery is dying, I may not finish recapping this session.)

Use your analytics to make sure that you know what you're doing. Don’t ignore data points. Don't try to blow out the space and don't let other companies make you panic. Spend your energy improving your conversion.

People who said 'Google's only going to be a search engine' either didn't know what Google was doing or didn't realize what being in search really meant in an era of ubiquitous information.

(There is still about 30 minutes left but I only have five of battery power so I'm going to post this now. Look for more brilliance from this session from the other recappers.)

Posted by Susan Esparza on 06/ 4/07 at 4:11 PM | Comments (0)
See more entries in Google, MSN Search, Pay-Per-Click, Yahoo, smxseattle07

April 11, 2007

Meet the Search Ad Networks

Rebecca Lieb is moderating this afternoon’s Meet the Search Ad Networks session featuring Doug Stotland (Microsoft adCenter), Stewart Easterby (Yahoo), John Kannapell (AOL), James Speer (Ask.com) and Brian Schmidt (Google). Now that representatives from all the engines present and I have a tummy full of falafel (thanks for lunch, Tamar! [Thank you, Tamar! --Susan]), I say let’s go!

Up first is Stewart Easterby. Everyone say hi to Stewart.

Stewart gives us a quick Yahoo update and says that Panama was the worst kept code name in the entire world. Heh.

He notes that the buzz around Panama started about a year ago and assures the audience that Yahoo is on pace to successfully move all of its advertisers over to the new platform. Early feedback is very positive, with users really enjoying the geo-targeting features, shares of clicks forecasting (can see potential bids and positions), and the signup process.

Stewart talks about some recent brand advocate research. A brand advocate is a customer who really loves a specific brand, but I’m sure you could probably figure that out yourself. Anyway, Yahoo conducted a survey and found that 87 percent of brand advocates search several times a week or more, 75 percent regularly use social media, and 2 in 3 social media users are brand advocates and highly engaged. I’m not sure what that has to do with paid search, but okay! Stats are delicious.

Stewart leaves his stat talk to remind us that Reggie Davis was recently appointed to VP of Marketplace Quality. He says that Yahoo is 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality across all of their listings. And for the first time Yahoo is revealing how many clicks they remove on a regular basis before advertisers are charged. The discount rate is 12-15 percent and that’s across the entire Yahoo network.

Up next for Yahoo are quality-based pricing, domain blocking capabilities in 2007 and building on their new deal with Viacom which will help them deliver search and contextual advertising on Viacom’s 33 broadband sites. Cool.

Up next is Doug Stotland to give us our adCenter update.

Doug makes a very important and impressive announcement: Yesterday, Microsoft adCenter finished first in a head to head competition with Google and Yahoo…in a Rock 'Em Sock ‘Em death match. (I can confirm the validity of this statement; I’m proud to say I was there.) Doug hopes this will give advertisers some confidence in Microsoft. I think I love him.

We’re also reminded that since the last SES, adCenter has been live for 11 months. They’ve launched in the US, UK, and Canada and done over 5 releases. The feedback has been consistent:

• Clicks are very good clicks -- The clicks people get from adCenter tend to convert higher in 4 of 5 categories, according to a recent study.
• Not delivering enough clicks to advertisers – Microsoft is now running a Pilot Program to open up ads on the Microsoft Network.
• Haven’t made it easy enough for advertisers to manage campaigns – If you want to play with new, not-yet-released adCenter features, you can visit http:/beta.adcenter.microsoft.com and toy around. Features include full text search, the ability to manage campaigns Costco-style, campaign import, favorites, and improved navigation and UI.

James Speer is next to talk about Ask Sponsored Listings.

The IAC Advertising Solutions was recently created to integrate all of their media and advertising solutions. It offers a one-stop-shop for media and search advertising throughout all of IAC’s properties.

James moves on to ASL and says its best feature is the standardization of its traffic. All of Ask’s publisher partners are actively monitored to ensure CPCs, conversion rates, and CPAs.

To ensure ASL advertisers get even distribution through the day, Ask calculates pacing factors which can be adjusted at the request of an advertiser. New campaigns are conservatively defaulted to a pacing factor of 50 percent. The lower the budget to spend ratio, the higher the pacing factor. The objective is to slowly move pacing up/down depending on search levels.

In Q2, 2007 Ask is introducing referrer blocking to the ASL console so that advertisers can decide where their ads are displayed. How does it work, you ask?

• Advertisers review their click logs to determine whit sites are driving down campaign CPA metrics
• Important data points include: date, keyword, clicks, conversions, and referrer
• Log into your ASL account and add the refers to be blocked

Brian Schmidt is up next and he’s here to talk about vision. Sweet.

Google believes they’re in the connection business. They connect consumers with what they’re looking for and connect advertisers with the customers they’re looking for. They do this through the three-tiered Google platform:

• Search Solutions
• Content Network
• Web Utilities & Other Programs

Google is working to give advertisers more control over their ad campaigns by launching tools like Google Web site Optimizer, pay per action ads (PPA) and CPC Site-Targeting.

Other things Google is working on:

• Google Audio Ads: bringing efficiency, relevancy and accountability to radio advertising. Audio ads will be at scale, targeted, efficient, inclusive and measurable

• Google Print Ads: Web-enabled marketplace for buyers and sellers of newspaper ads covering the top DMAs.
  

Next up is John Kannapell from AOL who says AOL’s Advertising Network is thriving.

AOL Search keeps users engaged, brings them back and enables high quality ad opportunities. (No, don’t laugh; he said that with a straight face). Their goal is to be accurate, more complete and more convenient.

AOL Search Marketplace allows advertisers to really focus their message to AOL users and give them more control. It also helps to increase ROI. What this does for AOL is bring an end to end solution. Users get:

• AOL-branded version of relevant components of the Google AdWords system
• Sponsored Links specifically on select AOL properties to select advertisers
• AOL’s new system offers advertisers the best of breed functionality, features and reporting that is used in Google’s AdWords system for text-based ads.

AOL Search Trademark Layer is the most prominent placement on the AOL search page. It appears above both the sponsored links and Web search results. There are four clickable elements.

Next came Q&A with was by far the most amusing part of the sessions thanks to some quirky mics and Brian’s (Google) inability to hear anyone in the audience. Heh, good times, good times.

The best question was posed by Rebecca Lieb, who dared the networks to answer one important question: Why should we spend with your network? The engines went round-robin to answer.

• Microsoft adCenter: Two reasons: These are the highest quality converting clicks and there are things you can learn and do on adCenter in terms of understanding your audience that you can take to apply to all your campaigns.
• Yahoo: The reach of the network, the quality of traffic, ease of use of our interface and the quality of support.
• AOL: Sends consistent message. Building a comprehensive solution to build your brand.
• Ask: We can deliver incremental conversions for the same CPAs. It’s an incremental buy. We have lower spend points established. Take the heavy lifting off your plate.
• Google: Reach, innovation and options, support and usability.

One advertiser asked the engines’ representatives how they can incorporate search ads in video.

Brian of Google responded that there are existing opportunities to use or leverage Google’s video marketplace. Obviously, Google believes that online video is a growing market, but they’re not sure about the right way to do it right now. They’ve been careful to put the user first and have been cautious not to damage the brand of YouTube.

I can’t help but think Googler’s answer questions far better than any other search engine rep. Maybe because they admit that they don’t know everything and that they’re okay with that. Googler’s are awesome.

And that’s it. Consider yourself updated on all the search marketing networks.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/11/07 at 12:17 PM | Comments (1)
See more entries in AOL, Ask, Branding, Google, MSN Search, Pay-Per-Click, SEM Events, Search Engines, Yahoo, sesny07

Keynote Conversation With Steve Berkowitz

[So far this morning I have chatted with Kim Krause-Berg and her hubby Eric, been taunted by Tamar and Barry, and got to buddy up with Danny Sullivan (major thanks to Paul Mooney!) for a bit (He sat next to me. I’m stealing the chair and hanging it in the office.). Oh yes, the official Danny meeting has happened. I can die a happy blogger. Hi Danny!] [So. Jealous. --Susan]

Oh, Microsoft’s Steve Berkowitz is speaking. Apparently, the session has started while I was daydreaming about what a rock star I am.

Steve explains to a packed room that he does product management at Microsoft, which means he helps drive the priorities for what they’re going to be working on. It’s about understanding what the customers want. He says that everyone at Microsoft has a very customer-focused attitude, studying customer research to learn and define what users want. Steve has never seen the organization want to drive towards critical mass more than it has right now. He’s very excited about the company itself and where they’re going to go. Aw, that’s nice. I’m excited about Bruce Clay, too. We’re all pretty cool people.

Danny opens up an important topic and asks Steve how Microsoft will handle the double branding of MSN and Live.com

The easy answer is that Microsoft is trying to extend that affiliation.

According to Steve, software and services are where the world is going. It’s about bringing the PC onto the Web. Microsoft is trying to figure out how to extend the Windows presence, the idea of what Window is, and the value proposition of Windows.

The value of Microsoft will come from user’s ability to take their identity with them using Live ID. As things evolve and new properties emerge, users will able to take who they are where they go, similar to how you can take your cell phone number wherever you go. Windows will become an extension onto the Internet.

One of Microsoft’s focuses right now is getting the products right. If they perfect the products users will be able to mix and match the properties in a way that makes sense for them. You’re going to see Microsoft take Live and integrate more social content. They’re brining lots more current events and UGC into the experience.

Danny asks Steve how Microsoft will win with search. Are they going to do anything to make it pop or are they okay with being number three?

The goal of search is to first reach critical mass in an advertiser’s perspective. And, no, Steve says, it’s not ever satisfactory to not be number 1.

Search will continue to evolve and we’re going to see it evolve in many different ways. There are two different kinds of searches – destination searches and convenient searches. The latter means that users search because they’re there. They’re surfing MySpace and there just happens to be a search box. Steve predicts search is going to evolve to be about where you take the experience of search and that’s what Microsoft is working on. They want to create innovative ways to deliver search where users are. Users want to know what their friends searched on.

He says the search war is not over. It’s about getting the basics right, focusing on that and then moving towards innovating – which is what Microsoft is doing in the Labs.

Danny says that one of the advantages Microsoft has is that they control the OS and the browser. We’ve had these deals where competitors are challenging that. Comments?

Steve calls these deals the “deal of the day”. They’re important today, but won’t be over the long term. That will happen because the product still needs to improve and get better.

According to Steve (slightly paraphrased. I’m not a robo typer):

One of the interesting things about being with Microsoft is that when you look at Windows in its purest form it’s a really nice interface. But by the time you get it it’s a completely different interface. You’re getting pop-ups from Symantec, from Google, from everyone. You look at Microsoft and say “why did you do this to me?” But we didn’t do anything to you. At the end of the day the customer is the final decision maker. It’s customer choice to set defaults.

Only not, because Microsoft and Google and working hard to change that. Danny asks if Microsoft will ever not set the default.

Steve laughs. I’m pretty sure that means no. It's part of the development cycle.

Danny asks if Microsoft will ever partner with Yahoo or Ask.com.

Oh, no.

Ms. Dewey has come to life and is now annoying all of us with her presence. No, seriously, she’s here and I hate her. Kim and Eric are both laughing. I am so not amused. Why are they doing this to me?

Make it stop.

She’s still here and Danny asks Steve about the future of Ms. Dewey. Great, now we’re talking about her. Maybe if no one looks at her she’ll just go away!

More talk from Ms. Dewey.

[I’m ignoring all the ridiculous banter thrown out by Ms. Dewey. Trust me, she didn’t say anything important. Only things to make your ears bleed. The guy next to me is totally confused. He keeps asking me who she is and why she’s here. I’m asking myself that second question.]

Steve says that Ms. Dewey represents that search is very much about the UI. It’s a way to deliver information in a different way. (If by different, you mean horribly annoying, then yes.)

Oh, thank goodness. The grand annoyance leaves and now it’s back to the original question -- does it make sense to partner with Yahoo or Ask?

Steve can’t answer that.

My goal is to concentrate on organic search. Searchers are using the products, they just don’t use them enough. We want to increase engagement. We want them to use not just Mail or Messenger but all of Microsoft’s properties together. We want to touch consumers in different ways and crack open the vault of stuff Microsoft creates. We’re going to build an amazing business, just by getting our stuff together. I feel so liberated about getting into all these different areas. You’ve got all these people building these great products and now it’s about connecting them.

Danny asks Steve to compare and contrast Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. What puts Microsoft ahead of them and where are there strengths?

Naturally, Steve says it’s not a question about who’s ahead and who’s behind. (*giggle*) We all have great audiences. Where people do better than Microsoft is depth of engagement. The way Yahoo has built across Yahoo traffic. Users are going to see great things from Microsoft in the future. They’re going to see them integrating things in a much smoother way.

Steve things their advantage is its scale and its reach. It’s going to be the things Microsoft surrounds search with that are going to make it that much more enticing and that much better. Microsoft is more than search. (Uh, let’s hope so.)

And now my favorite part of Danny’s interviews – the word association game. Yay!

Ready, go!

Google – Amazing
Yahoo – Working hard
AOL – Trying to hold its own
Ask – I love it.
Microsoft – Potential
Steve Berkowitz – Having fun

Such a great keynote and a very excellent way to start a Wednesday morning. Did I mention I got to sit next to Danny and pretend I was important? I did? Oh.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 04/11/07 at 9:08 AM | Comments (4)
See more entries in MSN Search, Microsoft, Rumors, SEM Events, sesny07

February 1, 2007

Search Headlines

Life After Vista

Steve Ballmer says that Microsoft’s next move post-Vista will be to improve search and tackle the threat posed by advertising-supported business models. I wish he would have just said "to tackle Google" because that would have been far less words to type and it’s obviously what he meant.

Steve told the Financial Times that Microsoft has dedicated the past few years developing Vista and addressing open source software issues, but now its time to put the focus back on search, which according to Steve, leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t disagree with that statement, but he doesn’t actually say, explain, or hint as to how Microsoft is going to do any of this. Just that they will. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

It also doesn’t inspire confidence that Steve refers to Microsoft as being “the underdog” in this whole search thing. I just can’t seem to reconcile that image in my head. [Yeah, they're definitely less an underdog than they are a "small, scrappy start-up" --Susan]

Jennifer Laycock is an evil, pork-hating breastfeeder

Don’t look at me like that. That headline is no less ridiculous than the pork industry threatening lactivist Jennifer Laycock with a trademark lawsuit for selling T-shirts promoting breastfeeding issues.

I’m (thankfully) childless but I’ve been to Jennifer’s The Lactivist site before and have forwarded it off to my friends with screaming, drooling, milk-sucking babies. Personally, I find Jennifer a great voice for the cause, but the National Pork Board seems to have taken offense to her shirt slogan “the other white milk”, which they say infringes on their trademark. Jennifer wins my heart, explaining:

“Apparently the National Pork Board is worried that someone might come to my breastfeeding blog, check out the shirts and worry that when I say "white milk" what I really mean is "thick and juicy, straight from the hog PORK." Come on now, be honest...were you confused?”

Even if their trademark concerns were valid, it just means Jennifer has to make sure there’s no confusion between breast milk and pork. Um, I’m pretty sure there’s not. It gets even more ridiculous because they also accuse Jennifer of attempting “to promote the use of breast milk beyond merely infant consumption”. Uh? I’m not even going there.

Tell Technorati Where The Fire Is

Technorati WTF is officially up and running today. The site looks similar to Digg in that it lets users share and vote on what’s “hot” on the Web. I first spotted a link to it while searching around on Technorati this morning and it looks like I’m not the only one. I wonder if Steve Rubel’s post yesterday helped to speed the release along any?

I’ve read that some people are pretty excited by this, but to be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever use it. I’m not sure I get the point and I’ve never been the kind of girl to use Digg-like sites anyway. Technorati WTF is interesting to me only in that it provides another level to Technorati, which I do use daily and love. For now I’ll just watch this one from the sidelines until someone emails me to tell me what a goldmine I’m missing, kinda like they did with MyBlogLog.

Fun Finds

Since we all have MyBlogLog on the brain (well, except Susan. Susan is uninterested in anything I’m interested in), ShoeMoney offers 10 Things I Wish MyBlogLog Would Do. I wish it stopped tracking my movements throughout the blogosphere. You don’t realize how awesome anonymity is until you lose it. [And that's why I didn't sign up and why I hate personalized results. Also, you damn kids get off my lawn.--Susan] -- Don’t laugh; Susan really is that old man sitting on his stoop with a shotgun. And she's not firing warning shots.

Bill Slawski takes Loren Baker’s lead and dives into 13 New Yahoo Search Marketing Patent Applications in the hopes of getting some insight into how the new Y!SM system may work under Panama.

Kim Krause wrote an important post entitled Internet Life: When You Leave Us, Will We Know It that struck a chord with me. If you haven’t read it, go do it now. It’s important to remember who and what you leave behind on the Web. That’s all I’m going to say.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 02/ 1/07 at 4:23 PM | Comments (2)
See more entries in Blogging, MSN Search, Microsoft, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

November 16, 2006

Search Engines Bring United Front to Sitemaps

The big news item of the day is that Yahoo! and Microsoft have joined together in support of Google’s Sitemaps XML protocol, an open-source tool that allows site owners to submit their content via crawler feeds in order to ensure proper spidering. This means site owners will now be able to go to one place to manually submit their site and alert GYM to any site changes.

This is pretty cool, and something most savvy search folk have been after for a long time.

Yahoo Search Product Manager Priyank Garg does a good job of explaining the benefits for both the engines and webmasters:

“This should make is easier for web sites to provide search engines with content and metadata. And in turn, search engines can spend less time crawling unchanged pages and can update indexes faster as new content is discovered. This will help us reflect the changes more quickly, and improve our ability to provide more timely and relevant search results for users.”

If you’re already using Google Sitemaps, you don’t have to do anything to reap the benefits. Just be aware the change has taken place and you can now reach Yahoo! and Microsoft using the same protocol.

If you haven’t been using Google Sitemaps, you can head over to the newly debuted Sitemaps.org site and learn how to install the XML file that will allow GYM to track site updates.

Again, this is very cool.

According to CNET, the idea for the standard protocol was initiated by Google and Yahoo!. The tool has been given Creative Commons license so that other engines can get on board as well, though who knows how much participation they’ll be allowed. There’s no mention of Ask.com’s lack of involvement, but that may be because they don’t accept manual submissions. Or maybe they just weren’t cool enough to be invited to the party. (I feel your pain, Ask.)

Even if Ask never gets on board, this is a great step for the engines to have made. Getting competitors to agree on common standards will enable site owners to spend less time worrying about submitting sites and more time on making those sites as strong and relevant as possible. It’s also good to see GYM united for good every once and awhile. We saw it when they united on the nofollow attribute for links, and now we’re seeing it again here,

And who knows, now that we’ve seen unification on this, maybe we’ll see other big search issues get a common solution down the road. It’d be nice to see the engines support universal advanced search commands or create a better system for detecting click fraud or work together to fight spam and great more relevant engines. But we’ll try not to get ahead of ourselves.

If you want to read more from straight from the engines themselves, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all blogged about it. And of course, it’s getting just a touch of coverage at Techmeme.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 11/16/06 at 11:18 AM | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Google, MSN Search, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo

October 31, 2006

Halloween Engine Roundup

I'm a bit high strung jumpy by nature, so Halloween has never been my favorite holiday; however, it always fun to see what the engines have worked up and what great lengths people will go to humiliate themselves.

I know I'm biased, but I think Ask.com once again takes the cake for the best holiday celebration. The homepage has been turned black and features lit jack-o-lanterns for that extra special touch. Highlighting their features, they also provide a link under the search box with rotating questions that all lead to Ask's various Halloween Smart Answers. Well played, guys, well played.

Over at Google, is a mummified version of the Google logo, with a skeletal hand forming the needed letter "E".

Clicking on the logo brings you to Google's search engine results page for the term "Halloween". Nice.

Yahoo! also played with their logo today, giving it the necessarily creepy touch.

Clicking on the logo brings you to Yahoo!'s Halloween 2006 page, which is chock full of scary myths and traditions, candy picks, scary movies, scary photos and scary stuff found on Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! Shopping. I was very happy to see Yahoo! highlighting a mix of their properties. Very nice.

Microsoft is again too cool to play along ,and the Live.com homepage is looking mighty boring today. For shame, guys.

The engines aren't the only one who got into the spirit of the day. Search Engine Roundtable and the Cre8asite Forums are both showing holiday logos, and we hope you've been enjoying the Bruce Clay search engine optimized-pumpkins (and their kitty friends) we've been running all month.

While Loren Baker rounded up some the Top 13 Halloween sites, the truth is, if you're looking for some real Halloween fun, the place to be is at the Bruce Clay, Inc, headquarters. Folks around here are dressed up to the nines (even our Bruce!) and everyone's having a great time. (I'll sneak you guys a group picture later, just don't tell anyone.) [We'll have a costume contest among the blog readers. You can email Lisa with your vote.--Susan]

Happy Halloween! :)

UPDATE:: We'll get you that group shot ASAP (trust me, it's worth waiting for), but here are some individual shots of selected Bruce Clay members we managed to scrounge up. Enjoy!

Posted by Lisa Barone on 10/31/06 at 10:51 AM | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Ask, Branding, Fun Stuff, Google, MSN Search, Search Engines, Yahoo

October 30, 2006

Is Conceding Yahoo!'s Only Chance for Survival?

Relying solely on the intelligence of multiple anonymous sources, FORTUNE published an article yesterday speculating that Yahoo! was on the hunt to snatch up AOL in order to save itself from Google domination.

Better yet, after Time Warner flatly denied that any talks were in the works, the article goes on to offer some other possible moves for Yahoo!, saying they can either:

• Sell to Microsoft
• Merge with eBay, or
• Stay the course

Pretty predictable alternatives, eh? Yes, all things we've heard, debated, and dismissed before. If I had to choose between any of the listed options, I'd go with door number three -- stay the course (though I'd modify it to "...and do it better").

While Yahoo! may not be experiencing the same kind of growth Google is (to be fair, neither is anyone else. No one's bothering Microsoft or Ask, are they?), they're not exactly stuck on a sinking ship either. Yahoo! continues to make money and if it can use Panama to improve its ad selling ability and leverage the strength of its verticals, there's no reason why Yahoo! can't make up some serious ground. Will it be overnight or accomplished by this time next year, probably not, but the potential is there.

The fact is, Google won't be top dog forever, why concede?

Jumping into a deal with AOL solely because Google has paired up with YouTube (which is what the article suggests) would be a bad move. Let's wait and see what Panama does for Yahoo first. See if advertisers come around before selling the whole organization off to the highest bidder.

And though it may be fun to sit here and blog Microsoft's purchase of Yahoo!, I'd actually rather not see that happen. Yahoo and Microsoft will never be complementary halves. Yahoo! is young and portal-like where, to many, Microsoft still seems overbearing and unsure of what to do with massiveness. My fear would be that, if acquired, Microsoft would suck the life out of Yahoo!, rendering it completely useless. [Not to mention that you shouldn't sell yourself to the guys who are doing worse than you are in your main industry. --Susan] -- Touché.

If Yahoo is tired of playing 'second fiddle' to Google, then being acquired by Microsoft is surely not the way to go. I'd rather be second than not exist, and if Microsoft buys Yahoo!, that will be their future. Terry Semel is too proud for that. I think he'd prefer to go down in a blaze of glory than to let Microsoft come and sweep up the pieces.

Which is exactly what Yahoo! should do. Let's set this ablaze. Hire product managers that won't go along with the status quo. Surround yourself with people who want better and who will strive for better. Start building on your verticals, an area that Google has often struggled in, and leverage their strength to bring back and excite users. The success of Yahoo! Answers has shown that the following is there. Millions of users still rely on Yahoo! for mail, music, horoscopes, weather and more. Use that. Attract them with your verticals and incorporate those verticals with your (hopefully) improving-by-the-day search engine.

With Panama now being rolled out, Yahoo! also stands to reclaim some of its lost PPC prominence. It won't be an easy climb back up, but with a revamped PPC program hitting the computer and the up-and-coming mobile Web, there's room for Yahoo to grow.

I don't know what's in the water lately, but it seems almost everyone has an alternative plan for Yahoo!, most suggesting that Terry Semel should sell off the company or at least concede to Google in search.

There's no reason for Yahoo! to concede anything at this point. If you sell yourself off to one of your competitors, or a company that isn't even loosely affiliated with what you do, you only stand to lose, not win. If Yahoo! wants to beat Google, they have to start being exciting, not to rashly scoop up companies just because you can. Yahoo! can do it, but they're going to have to stay and fight.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 10/30/06 at 11:54 AM | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Branding, Google, MSN Search, Microsoft, Search Engines, Yahoo

October 18, 2006

GYM: The Battle for Number One

After eMarketer announced yesterday that Google is on track to becoming the first company to ever pocket 25 percent of U.S. online ad spend, things were looking pretty grim for Yahoo! and Microsoft (especially after Yahoo!'s tough Tuesday). But, how long can Google keep this up? Will Yahoo! and Microsoft ever be able to catch them in the search game?

The report by eMarketer touted impressive figures for the folks at the GOOG. If their predictions are accurate, Google will show a 65 percent increase in revenue growth this year, with total ad revenue topping $4 billion.

By comparison, yesterday Yahoo! announced a 38 percent revenue decrease (leaving them at $159 million) and a need to go "back to basics" to fix the downward spiral scenario. Terry Semel attributed the poor third quarter results to cutbacks from auto and financial advertisers, and an increase in competition for lower priced advertising (better known as "Google").

The reasons Terry gives are troubling because they are two areas where Google is only growing stronger.

The one thing Google knows how to do is leverage its advertising. Advertisers love Google. Unfortunately for Yahoo! and Microsoft, Google will only become more dominant with YouTube in its arsenal. Of course, Yahoo! will have a chance to recoup some lost advertising dollars now that Panama is live, but it's been so long since Yahoo! relinquished its PPC King crown that it may just be too late.

In order for Yahoo! to compete with Google, it will have to successfully leverage Panama, continue to differentiate itself by improving its media portal, aggressively pursue opportunities (like yesterday's Right Media Inc investment and AdInterax acquisition), and find a way to compete in video. The CBS deal is a good start, but it's not enough to combat GooTube.

And what about Microsoft?

Microsoft won't reveal their quarter results until later this month, and you can't help but wonder what's coming. Why did Steve Ballmer feel the need to clarify that the previous estimate for 2007 Research and Development was more than a billion dollars off? Was he really talking "off the top of his head" back in May or did plans change over the course of the year? It sounds like we're in for a surprise when the results are made public.

I have no problem with Microsoft allocating more money to research; but it's troubling when executives can't account for where their money is going. If we accidentally spent a large sum of money in an area we weren't expecting, it would probably signify some sort of trouble internally. I hope that's not the case for Microsoft, but it might be.

It would be encouraging to see Microsoft allocate money to grand development plans. Show me you have something else to offer besides Vista. Show me the lights are on in Redmond.

Ballmer admitted that with Google they finally have some competition for talent – which, of course, includes finding new talent and holding on to established team members. Over the past few months there have been several high profile exits, including Martin Taylor, Vic Gundotra, Michael Wehrs and Doug Burgum. Why are they leaving?

Perhaps we'll get an answer to that question (among others) once the quarter results are made public.

Yahoo! and Microsoft have found themselves in an uncomfortable situation at present, but as long as they keep playing smart and thinking innovatively, there's room for the tide to change. The numbers released by eMarketer show Google as not just The One to Beat, but as an unstoppable force with the power to bowl over the competition. But that won't last forever.

Internet darlings have a predetermined shelf life – look what happened to AOL or to the Microsoft of the '90s. Both were the "it" companies of their time, they garnered a lot of buzz and had very public downfalls. It's very possible that in 3-5 years Google's reign will end. But who will be there to start anew? Yahoo! and Microsoft have been doing a pretty good job in the race for second, but it's time to start gunning for first. The company to succeed Google is laying the groundwork today.

Posted by Lisa Barone on 10/18/06 at 4:52 PM | TrackBack (0)
See more entries in Ask, Google, MSN Search, Microsoft, Search Engines, Yahoo