Jeff's World - TradeMark Infringement
If you're a regular reader of Search Engine Lowdown, you'll no doubt have become accustomed to reading the caustic comments offered by "Jeff". "Jeff" is actually Jeff Buechler, our Enterprise Sales Director and probably one of the most loyal readers of SEL.
We've decided that Jeff's comments are far too entertaining to let languish in the world of our "comments" section and so, we are today starting a new regular irregular feature entitled, "Jeff's World" (Jeff's World, Jeff's World, party-time). In this post, Jeff tackles trademark infringement.
Trademark infringement lawsuits while worrisome in the short-term, is ultimately much ado about nothing. Google, Overture and the other PPC engines could quickly and easily resolve this issue; simply allow no one, including the trademark holder, to bid on restricted, or trademarked, terms. (Fair use would still apply to the vast majority of terms.) Those PPC dollars would then migrate to other terms.
Ex. 7 companies are currently bidding on the term 'GEICO' with a top bid of $1.21. (GEICO not being one of them) Simply shut that term off, like Google has with cigarettes, gambling, prescription drugs, etc. Then, if those companies aren't already, they'll bid on other terms; 'car insurance' (top bid $8.54) or get more creative and bid on terms such as 'compare car insurance'; top bid $2.26 by, you guessed it, GEICO.
And, does anyone think that someone performing a search for ‘GEICO’ isn’t ultimately going to go the GEICO site to cost compare or gather additional information?
In the long run, it may actually turn out to cost the trademark holder free branding and more money. And more money spent on PPC, is what Google and the other PPC engines really want.
That’s my 2 cents, wait make that 10 cents for my minimum bid.
Databases and search engines provide instantaneous access to endless information about anyone or anything, but the search results often include as many misses as hits. To generate more-relevant answers, organizations including the federal government are using topic maps to index their data. read more Andy Beal
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Hardcore Google
If you're a hardcore investor - the type who hangs around the mailbox just waiting for the latest issue of Barron's - you'll enjoy every word Bambi Francisco has to say about the supply and demand of Google stock. Andy Beal
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Google Losing Trademark Lawsuit Battle? When it comes to trademark infringement lawsuits, Google may not yet have lost the war, but they're sure losing the battles.
Battelle has details of the latest setback for Google, in the Geico case. Andy Beal
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Google Offers Share Buyback Reuters reminds us that Google still has the small issue of 23.4 million shares that were not correctly registered with the SEC.
Google said it expects little acceptance of the buyback offer, which has a weighted average offer price of $3.94 per share.
"Expects little acceptance"? That could be the biggest understatement of the year. Would you part with your shares for a few bucks, when you can sell them for $181?
When the buyback offer expires, any shareholders who did not accept the offer will have freely tradable stock, subject to lock-up and vesting restrictions.
But will they still have a job? Will they care? Andy Beal
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November 29, 2004
A Search Engine for your Television
Save this CNet article for your coffee break, as it's quite lengthy. Bottom line? Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all working to bring search to a TV screen near you.
Google?
...Google's project for TV search is ultra-secretive; only a handful of broadcast executives have seen it demonstrated so far. To build the service, the company is recording live TV shows and indexing the related closed-caption text of the programming. It uses the text to identify themes, concepts and relevant keywords for video so they can be triggers for searching.
Microsoft?
... it's developing search technology that will be platform agnostic, meaning it will allow people to find text and video from various mediums like broadband, broadcast and set-top boxes. It aims to do so by creating a specialized index for traceable programming labeled with metatags, or keywords.
Yahoo?
...plans to collect XML feeds of video content from third-party publishers. That way, it can index programming and make it searchable to visitors. Yahoo's database will rely on the title and description of video content to deliver relevant results, as opposed to actual language within the video. Andy Beal
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Google Looking for an Ad Agency
According to Church Marketing Sucks (catchy name) Advertising Age reports Google is looking for an ad agency in what would most likely be a multi-million dollar account. Andy Beal
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Worried You've Missed the Google Boat?
CNN Money looks at the rise of Google's share price and gives retail investors some interesting competitive analysis. If you've not yet bought Google stock, this is a great article to read. Andy Beal
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Bringing Spammers to their Knees? Interesting report from the BBC...
Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.
Lycos hopes will it make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.
The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.
An interesting approach but what if the spammers fight back? I'm not a hacker, but I bet any screensaver that is able to connect to an internet server, is also susceptible to receiving internet connections too! I'll give it a week before someone figures out how to send a virus or trojan to all the Lycos screensaver users.
Microsoft Evangelist Still Prefers Google Over MSN Search Robert Scoble still prefers the results from Google compared to the new MSN Search.
"Personally, I still like Google the best. Why? MSN and Yahoo push their results down with too much advertising.
It's funny, I should appreciate the advertising on MSN more. After all, it helps pay my salary. But the thing that Google did great was to take a customer-centric approach.
Sorry MSN team, I'm still not switching."
Top of MSN Search's list is to get Scoble on board. With the number of readers his blog has, they need his endorsement! Andy Beal
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Ask Jeeves Not in the SEO Business or are they? Gary Stein picks up on a story we blogged about Ask Jeeves having SEO services. He contacted Ask for an official response, which was...
MaxOnline was acquired by Ask Jeeves during the ISH acquisition earlier this year. MaxOnline provides a range of services for online advertisers, and has a third party relationship with an SEO provider. The relationship existed prior to the acquisition and Ask Jeeves has not made any recent movement with this relationship. This is a small component of the MaxOnline business and it is not directly affiliated with the Ask Jeeves search index.
That makes sense, but I didn't see a denial from Ask Jeeves that they wouldn't be pursuing SEO services.
Update: Jim Lanzone, Snr VP for Ask Jeeves, emailed me to say "No, it's not true". Andy Beal
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Why did Mamma Buy Copernic?
Jupiterresearch analyst, Gary Stein gives his thoughts on why Mamma decided to buy Copernic.
So, what's Mamma going to do with Copernic? Stay in the game. How long can they (or anyone else) keep doing this? It's hard to say, but chasing anyone else's innovation trail is a tough game to win at, if for no other reason than you have to keep evaluating your plans. Andy Beal
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Chris Sherman Talks Search
Rocky Mountain News has an interview with Chris Sherman, who talks search and plugs his new book Google Power. Andy Beal
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Want Press? Just Mention Google! Chris Gaither takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the increased number of press releases that mention of Google.
Echoing the giddiest days of the dot-com boom, small companies are issuing press releases that trumpet any affirmation they get from online superstar Google Inc., even if it's just a bump in the Web search titan's rankings.
I love this idea...
Nathan Weinberg, a New York-based blogger who has ridiculed the rash of Google- oriented releases, had a suggestion: "Perhaps Google can boost its stock by announcing it has entered a strategic partnership with Google?" Andy Beal
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Search Engine Review in 2004
Matt Hicks takes a look back at the developments in the search engine industry during 2004.
As the year ends, the battle line lies among three top competitors: Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. Waiting in the wings are Ask Jeeves Inc, which doubled its search share during the year, and a rash of startup companies hoping to reinvent search the way Google reinvigorated it with its PageRank and other technologies.... Andy Beal
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Mamma.com Plans to Acquire Copernic Technologies A smart move by Mamma.com as they announce their intention to acquire Copernic.
Copernic's desktops search solutions will give Mamma technology that would make Google jealous. Andy Beal
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November 24, 2004
Happy Thanksgiving
We'll be taking a break for the holidays and will be back on Monday.
Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving! Andy Beal
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Congrats!
To our friend Kimberly Krause, who is getting married on December 3rd.
May you be blessed with a happy marriage! Andy Beal
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Top Search Engine Toolbars Reviewed
CNet reviews the top 7 search engine toolbars and looks at compatibility and features.
For those of you who don't have time to click on the link, the winner is Yahoo. Andy Beal
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Yahoo's WebmasterWorld Presentations Online
Yahoo Search blog diva, Nancy Evars offers coverage of the Vegas conference and provides online access to Yahoo's presentations. Andy Beal
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Searching Publications with Ebrary I haven't checked, but I bet Gary Price is all over this story from the Mercury News. Mike Bazeley reports on Ebrary, a search tool for publications.
Ebrary takes PDF versions of publications -- typically supplied by publishers -- rips them apart and reconstructs them so they can be entered into a searchable database. A downloadable piece of software called the ebrary Reader embeds itself into Web browsers and allows users to view the documents, aided by a bevy of features not available in standard PDF readers. Andy Beal
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Lots of Google Desktop Downloads
John Battelle has data from the Majestic group that demonstrates more than 1.3 million unique users visited the Google Desktop download page.
Interestingly, less than half of them actually downloaded it. I would have thought that the "curiosity factor" alone would have made for more downloads than that. Andy Beal
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Google's Froogle Adds Sticky Factor Smart move by Google. You can now create a "Wish List" of items that you would like for Christmas, using Froogle. You need to either have a Gmail or Groups account in order to use the tool, which is a great way to boost members before Q1 '05.
Ask Jeeves and Lycos offer SEO Services
ISEDB reports on moves by Ask and Lycos to provide SEO services and predicts tough times ahead for SEO firms.
I don't see a threat here for anyone other than very bad SEO firms. The good ones will still find plenty of clients. Besides, the search engines already offer PPC management solutions, yet PPC management is still being outsourced to third-party, impartial, SEM firms. The same will happen with SEO.
Anyway, should the search engines themselves start dominating SEO, they'll need to hire good people and you'll all end up with lots of stock options at a strike price of $180! ;-) Andy Beal
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Search Engine Vanity Overload
Charlene Li points to Ziggs, a new search engine thats helps users find business professionals and helps professionals massage their ego.
The basic premise is that there are some professional – for example, lawyers, real estate agents, job candidates and yes, analysts – who want to be found on search engines like Google...They have in one index over 1 million profiles – spidered from thousands of corporate Web sites. Users can set up their own profiles (here’s mine) or companies can submit profiles on behalf of their professionals. For now, this is free for individuals, but Ziggs plans to charge a $25 fee in the future. Andy Beal
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Google Euphoria Continues Just when you though Google's stock was heading for sub-$150, Goldman analyst Anthony Noto initiates coverage on Google with an "outperform" rating and a price target of $225.
$225?!? Kind of high considering that Noto forecasts that Google's earnings per share will enjoy compound annual growth of about 25% from 2006 through 2009.
That figure is also a lot less than the 50% growth predicted by CSFB and their target price was just $145!
Small & Medium Sized Businesses Embrace Performance-Based Marketing
According to The Kelsey Group, via ClickZ, three segments of the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) marketplace most inclined to adopt performance-based Internet marketing are newer businesses, "tech-forward" organizations, and direct mail marketers.
Searching for Something? Ask Your Butler! USA Today has a great article on the rise, fall and rise again of Ask Jeeves. From their "highs" of $169 stock price, to the "lows" of an "ask a question" model that never really worked, back to the "highs", with a smart business strategy and the acquisition of Teoma.
Much of Jeeves' visitor growth stems from its $343 million acquisition in March of Interactive Search Holdings, which includes the Web sites iWon, Excite and Myway.com. The acquisition doubled Jeeves' search share. Danny Sullivan, editor of the SearchEngineWatch online newsletter, says that while Jeeves is a clear "underdog" to the Big Three of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, it's a "scrappy, innovative" competitor. Andy Beal
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Copernic Desktop a Better Option than Google Desktop? PC World compares Copernic Desktop Search and Google Desktop Search and looks at the features of each.
The last sentence seems to sum it up well.
Desktop search is a wonderful concept. Using either of these products can save you time. However, Copernic's tool offers certain protections, thanks to the way its software is structured. With Google's tool, you might do better to wait until its security flaws are addressed. Andy Beal
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RSS Ad Test Working So Far
According to MarketingVOX, the ongoing test of RSS ads placed in text syndication feeds through Overture and FeedBurner reveals only that there has been no negative feedback from advertisers.
Which either means they are being accepted or RSS subscribers as just too lazy to complain. Andy Beal
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November 22, 2004
iProspect Jumps the Gun We were a little perplexed when we saw iProspect's announcement that all of their PPC staff had been given the new Google Advertising Professionals certification. Had they built a time-machine to avoid the 90-day mandatory period, before becoming certified?
According to Danny Sullivan, they may just have gotten a little trigger-happy with their press release.
...certification was only supposed to be awarded after an individual had been enrolled in the certification program for 90 days and passed its other requirements. So while the iProspect staff members have passed their tests, it seems like more time needs to be passed until they are actually granted official certification.
Some companies have been beta testing the program before its formal launch. However, my understanding from Google was that regardless of prior participation, all companies would still have to apply and be subject to the same 90 day period from when the program formally began.
If iProspect does get a waiver for the 90-day waiting period, expect a whole host of SEMs to want their dues too.
Update: According to Danny..."iProspect tells me that it misinterpreted being told by Google that their staff had passed the test (one of three requirements for certification) to mean they were actually certified. The company is now pulling the press release and plans to reannounce once the 90 days have passed." Andy Beal
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Google a Threat to Microsoft
You don't normally see the words "formidable threat to Microsoft" unless they are also accompanied by the words "anti-trust", but times are changing.
Allison Linn looks at how Google has been able to turn the tables and be the 800-pound gorilla of search, compared to Microsoft's cute little chimp. Andy Beal
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Size Doesn't Matter in Search Does the largest search engine index make you the best search engine? The NY Times asks that question and gets a very blunt answer from Ask Jeeves.
Jim Lanzone, a senior vice president at Ask Jeeves, said the company believed there were only another 100 million to 200 million English-language documents it wanted. He said other search engines could be padding their indexes with “porn, spam and duplicates, which probably account for a good three billion documents out there on the Web.” Andy Beal
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Vivisimo CEO Predicts Clustering, Not Personalization, the Future of Search
Vivisimo CEO, Raul Valdes-Perez pops-up on CNet to tell us the many inherent problems with personalization in search and looks at why clustering may be the answer. Andy Beal
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Google Sues AdSense Fraudsters Don't click on your own AdSense links! That is the message Google is trying to send out, as it sues Texas-based Auction Experts International for clicking on their own ads, to try and increase their AdSense revenue.
“[Auctions Expert] flagrantly abused the AdSense Online service by artificially and/or fraudulently generating ad clicks,” the complaint stated. “These clicks were worthless to advertisers because they generated significant and unjust revenue for the defendants, who were paid by Google as if the clicks were legitimate.” Andy Beal
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Google Sued for Giving Away Porn for Free
According to Chris Gaither, Google is being sued by CA porn company Perfect 10. Perfect 10 alleges that web surfers can find its copyrighted pictures of nude women for free by performing Google searches.
The company said it has sent 27 formal requests to the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google to remove the offending Web sites from its index and stop displaying the photographs in its search results, but was not satisfied with Google's response.
"It's very difficult to make money when all of your pictures are given away worldwide for free," said Perfect 10 President Norm Zada.
Perfect 10 should simply change their images around on a regular basis. It will take Google Images at least 6 months to catch-up! ;-) Andy Beal
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November 19, 2004
Google Opens-up Google Deskbar API
According to Battelle, Google is opening up the API for its Deskbar which will allow developers to add their own features. Andy Beal
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Google Founders Sell Stock According to SiliconValley.com, Larry Page and Sergey Brin each plan to sell up to 7.2 million shares of their stock in the online search engine leader during the next 18 months.
Based on current prices, Page and Brin would each pocket $1.2 billion from their planned stock sales while Schmidt, 49, would collect $373 million. Andy Beal
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WebSourced, Inc. Named Mid-Size Company of the Year
Thanks to NCEITA for naming us North Carolina's Mid-Size Company of the Year! Andy Beal
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November 18, 2004
WebmasterWorld of Search Conference, Day 3
I may, or may not, have made it to the keynote today. I will say this: I don’t have anything to report on it. I plea the fifth.
I did, however, manage to stumble into today’s Affiliate Smack Down (You won’t see or hear sessions like this at SES, folks.) and the Super Session of the day, Running With the Big Dogs! Are you the master of your domain?
Affiliate Smack Down
The affiliate smack down had a lot of great information for both marketers and affiliate managers. It was very much a sex, drugs, and rock and roll session; no holds barred. Oh, and apparently gay porn sells well in the UK market.
A lot of emphasis was placed on trying to get affiliate managers to better understand affiliates and their needs. As an affiliate, customer service is absolutely essential. Building that positive relationship may reap rewards by several orders of magnitude later on down the road.
In addition to building relationships with affiliates, a great deal of importance was placed on setting up simple, easy-to-use, backend systems – if you don’t make your service easy to use, you’re sure to lose great affiliates.
Adam Jewell, from NetPlus Marketing, spoke on affiliate marketing directly through AdWords. Some absolutely great points were made about how to properly manage PPC accounts, bids, and working with seasonality. Adam noted that by properly setting up ad creatives for seasonal products, he has been able to achieve 10-40% clickthrough rates on his ads during those times. PPC managers take note.
Running With the Big Dogs! Are you the master of your domain?
This closing session did an excellent job of outlining, and explaining how to address, common problems with small Internet marketing firms. If I had to pick one thing that best summed up the session, it would be: You have to do more than just take care of your customers.
Christine Churchill started by emphasizing the importance of building trust with your customers, or prospects. She followed by outlining several ways that you can do this on your website:
Professional site design
Having, and displaying, a physical address and phone number
Displaying trust seals
Having, and displaying, a privacy policy
Testimonials
Product reviews and awards
Guarantees
Next, Jessie Stricchiola spoke on three main issues in small business development; reliance on word of mouth for new business, lack of top 10 positions for your key terms, and limited cash flow.
She then outlined how her company, Alchemist Media, practiced SEO customer retention management:
Client Selection. Several times, she noted that having quality clients reaps many more rewards than a client who ends up taking up all of your time, or has incredibly unreasonable expectations
Prior SEO Engagements. I thought this was a great point in that serial SEO service users (companies that have been through a few SEO companies before) have often been through several SEOs for a reason.
Client Development Resources. While it is nice to be able to fix all of a clients website needs, it is often not the case that a smaller company will have the resources to provide, for free, website redesigns, URL rewriting, etc. Knowing your clients’ development resources is key in possibly finding alternative ways of attacking a problem, or can be a red flag for a campaign that won’t succeed. (ie: no amount of traffic would lead to sales due to a poor website design, and the client doesn’t have the resources to make the necessary changes.)
Communication and Expectations. This is something that I feel is common throughout the industry, be it that you’re working in a large or small SEO company. Understanding that SEO as a marketing channel is relatively new, there’s often a great deal of education that goes into building a client’s relationship so that they understand that getting ranked number one for “car” would both lead to very miniscule conversions, and would also take quite a long time to get into that position.
Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink reflected many of the same sentiments, and had some great cartoon slides to emphasize each point. ;)
Collaboration with clients is essential.
Build strategic alliances with your clients.
Protect your reputation.
Choose your clients carefully.
Match the solution to the problem.
Don’t overplay your hand.
After the session, Brett asked for a show of hands as to where to have the next conference: San Francisco, Austin, or New Orleans. New Orleans won by a large margin, so word on the streets is that the next conference will be in New Orleans between April 15th and May 30th. Brett also said that next fall, the conference will, again, be in Las Vegas. I don’t think too many people will have a problem with that. ;)
The classic “Pub Session” is today at 4:00 at New York, New York at some bar that I can’t pronounce, let alone spell.
All in all this was definitely the best conference I’ve been to, as the information was very raw, in-the-trenches, sort of information that was incredibly valuable to all attendees.
Gambling.com Turns into a Search Engine According to Ecommerce Times, London-based Gambling.com will no longer accept "traditional" forms of online advertising, such as banners, text links, pop-ups and sponsorship; instead, it will now only offer pay-per-click search advertising using a proprietary engine which has been developed in house over the past six months.
If you can't beat Overture and Google (they banned gambling ads), then join them!
Anyone have the odds on their success? ;-) Andy Beal
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Yahoo Accepting Redirects at a Search Engine Near You
Our WebmasterWorld reporter, Ben Wills, called-in to let us know that Yahoo has confirmed, that in the next couple of weeks, Yahoo will finally have their redirect issues resolved.
We thought about cracking the whip and making Ben drop his beer and do a write-up immediately, but Barry already got there.
Redirect Handling By Yahoo. All this stuff should be working ok in two weeks. Redirects from one domain to another will index the "target" rather then the "source". Meta Redirects: > 1 sec treated as a 301, < 1 sec is treated as a 302. Redirects internal will keep the source as the main link. This will be launched shortly, and you should see stuff happening in the next four weeks. This should fix all the issues discussed in the forums. Andy Beal
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More News on Google Scholar Danny Sullivan gives his thoughts on Google Scholar and highlights how the tool provides access to the "hidden web".
Meanwhile, Gary Price is practically wiping away the drool as the blogger of all things "scholarly", gets his hands on the new offering. Andy Beal
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Rich Media to Surpass Search Engine Marketing?
eMarketer makes the bold prediction that rich media advertising spending will surpass search marketing by the end of the decade, via MarketingVOX. Andy Beal
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Yahoo's Overture Extends Sponsored Search Relationship with MSN Through June 2006 According to an announcement today, Overture will continue providing sponsored search results to MSN Search through June 2006, suggesting that MSN is not quite ready to launch their own paid search product.
"Overture has been a strategic partner of MSN since 2001, and we look forward to continuing our productive relationship," said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president for the MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform division at Microsoft. "We are pleased that our collaboration has helped grow the online ad industry and benefited consumers and advertisers in the process." Andy Beal
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More WebmasterWorld Conference Coverage
Barry Schwartz has some great reports for those of you who can't get enough. Andy Beal
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Ask Jeeves & Yahoo Next With Desktop Search Products?
Matt Weeks reports confirmation from Ask Jeeves that they will launch their desktop search in December.
While Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves hasn't provided many details, its product appears likely to follow the approach of other Web search engines by combining hard-drive results, such as from e-mails and files, with its core Web results.
And what about Yahoo? According to Tim Mayer, director of product management for Yahoo Search...
"We feel the desktop is important, and we want to provide a full search experience," Mayer said. "It's a strategic entry point, and a lot of [Web] search is about distribution."
So are we going to see a Yahoo Desktop anytime soon? I'm sure Tim has his gag orders, but his response is no more enlightening than this for which Jeremy Zawodny had this to say.
So over to you Jeremy, will we see Yahoo Desktop and when? ;-) Andy Beal
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EBay to Ban 'Racially Derogatory' Search Terms, Could Google be Next? This is a bold step by eBay. According to CNSNews.com, eBay plans to implement a "pop-up" notification when "racially derogatory" search terms are entered on the website. EBay will formally announce the change on Wednesday, which the National League of Cities has been pushing.
A CNSNews.com search of certain "racially offensive" terms on the site did produce a page of items for sale containing the "n" word. Most of the results were in the form of book or artwork titles.
When asked if such items or their titles would be prohibited from eBay listings, Pionke explained that, "There's going to be like a pop-up on eBay saying that ... the words are not acceptable for usage on eBay."
Could we see Google, Yahoo or MSN adopt something similar? Thoughts?
Google's Smart Moves Help Compony Growth
I couldn't come up with a headline as catchy as Fool.com's "Google's G-nius", a report that discusses the smart acquisitions and product launches from Google that have helped it stay ahead of the game. Andy Beal
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Google Launches Search for Scholars CNet reports that Google has launched a search tool aimed at those searching scholarly literature such as technical reports, theses and abstracts.
Google Scholar searches a specific subset of Google's index and covers a wide swath of fields, from medicine and physics to economics and computer science.
Search algorithms also are specially tailored for the new service, said Anurag Acharya, a principal engineer at Google. Andy Beal
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Google Says High Sales Growth May Not Continue
According to Bloomberg, a Google filing said the revenue growth rate for the third quarter from the second quarter may not be sustainable.
I Respect iProspect but... Proclaiming "Fortune 1000-level companies must target single-word keywords with their natural search engine optimization (SEO) efforts" when your data comes from just "39-44 clients", does not impress me.
When data from OneStat suggests the decline in the frequency of one-word phrases, it's hard to believe that we should think otherwise. We have over 1300 clients and couldn't honestly tell our Fortune 1000 clients that they "must target" one-word phrases "branded and unbranded". Sure they can target a few branded phrases but having too many will only increase traffic while decreasing conversions.
KeywordRanking's very own VP of Interactive Advertising, Tom Dwyer, goes as far as to say, "Even Overture switched to broad match from exact match because there was not enough value coming from one-word keywords".
Hey, iProspect is a competitor and you may think this post is just arguing for the sake of it. But if Jupiter or Forrester suggested the same thing, I'd still argue it. Andy Beal
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November 17, 2004
WebmasterWorld of Search Conference, Day 2 Keynote: Noel McMichael
Noel, co-founder and CEO of MarketLeap, provided a very thorough business analysis of the Search industry as a whole. Likening it to an ecosystem, Noel defined different parts of the Search ecosystem, and emphasized, as with any industry’s ecosystem, that it’s vitally important to know your role within.
Five parts of this ecosystem, and corresponding examples, are:
Search Engines; Overture, Google, Yahoo!, etc.
SEMs, Tools, etc; trusted or not trusted
Advertisers; small or large
End Users; consumers, procurers
Distribution Partners; AOL, Infospace, CNN, etc.
He went on to discuss how some organizations may be part of different parts of the ecosystem. For example, a search engine marketing company may also be an advertiser. Regardless, he re-emphasized the importance of knowing your role, and also, knowing your role when making key decisions.
In this system, as in any system, Noel also discussed that there would be one role in the ecosystem that would be the context provider, setting the guidelines for the ecosystem. The analogy made, was that in a forest ecosystem, you don’t control the fact that trees produce oxygen – you adapt to that, and make sure that you are able to make use of it in order to survive.
Finally, Noel outlined what he called to be 7 Imperatives for Success:
Define ecosystem direction and values
Foster open relationships
Focus all participants on the end customers
Treat employees, partners and vendors as investors in human capital
Search engines must define the governance and rules of engagements
Leverage knowledge and information of external entities
Evolve or become extinct
As if to state an unofficial eighth rule, the whitescreen was suddenly displaying two pictures: the first of one of the VPs of MarketLeap in urban dress and sunglasses, as if to appear on the cover of a CD and the other of Mikkel deMib Svensen in his token bright orange suit with red sunglasses. Noel went on to say:
Hire individuals that contradict the norm.
It definitely got a good laugh out of the crowd, and the point was very well made.
Proactive Linking:
I honestly thought that this session would go much more in depth into specific techniques that are being used today, but, as if to hold their secrets to their bosom, everyone kept the session at a very high level.
One very good point was made, though, that when engaging in a new linking campaign, that it is best to test ad creatives via PPC test campaigns before executing the linking campaign. The point was also made, in conjunction with this sentiment, that linking should not only be done to increase search engine relevance, but also to increase traffic to your site from visitors clicking on those links (in this context, it was generally being spoken of with regards to purchasing links).
Shopping Search Engines
I found this to be a very informative session regarding the use of the Yahoo! Shopping and Froogle shopping search engines. Included in the discussion was, here’s that keyword again, how to increase relevance of your shopping search engine ads, but also how to optimize your listings for those search engines and also for increased clickthrough on your ads.
Andrew Chen of Yahoo! Shopping started the session by describing main visitor behaviors, and also functions of shopping search engines, as browsing and searching for products. It was noted that there didn’t seem to be a preference for users, either towards searching for products or browsing for products, and, in fact, Andrew noted that most users actually used both functions, seemingly equally.
Probably the most important message displayed by both Andrew and Matt Cutts of Google, was that relevancy isn’t just keywords and how you rank for them. This is much more of a fine art than SEO in that a few of the things you must keep in mind are picture quality of your product, freshness, and price. With users being able to browse so many products, or the exact same product, from so many companies at once, it’s imperative that you set your listing apart from the others.
Requirements to get into the Yahoo! Shopping search engine are that you have the title of the listing, the price, the description and an image of your product. Additionally, your products may get in via a Natural Search crawl, Yahoo! Shopping’s Product submit, Overture, and by CPM advertising through Yahoo! Shopping.
Andrew closed out his presentation by outlining four distinct ways to optimize your Yahoo! Shopping listings:
High quality product images
Including as much information as possible in your listing; category, brand, model number, part number, UPC, and age or sex specific information, if applicable.
Product names and descriptions should be concise, accurate, and follow manufacturer conventions
Freshness of your listing.
Matt Cutts from Google kicked of his presentation with an apology. It was quite apparent that he had a pretty good night before and said, “You know it’s a great WebmasterWorld conference when you’re well on your way to losing your voice after the first night.” I’m sure a few drinks tonight will help that out, Matt. ;) Andrew, I think it would be in Yahoo!’s best interest to keep him double-fisting his drinks and out late tonight at the Yahoo! Party. ;)
Matt outlined that it is possible to get into Froogle via AdWords, sending a product feed, or via a natural crawl. He emphasized, later, that the best way to get into Froogle and maintain a successful listing was to submit your product feed on a daily basis – Froogle will drop your listing if it has not been updated within 30 days. An added benefit of using a feed to send your products to Google lies in that feed results are shown first.
The benefits of Froogle goes to both the end users and to the merchants. For users, not using a paid inclusion model insures both results by relevance, and broad coverage since it is open to all merchants. For the merchants, the value comes in that there is no cost involved, and that it’s more free traffic from Google.
Matt also touched on the fact that Froogle has recently implemented a merchant rating system that factors into relevance of listing as well. Additionally, Matt noted that Froogle now has the ability to automatically convert your Froogle data feed to your AdWords account. This is certainly a feature we’ll be looking further into over the next few weeks.
Matt closed by discussing the internationalization of Froogle, the end goal to be in all countries, but that right now, Froogle is separately available in the US and UK – if you offer service to these two countries you must use that country’s feed area separately.
I usually find that the Q&A sessions reveal questions that are highly targeted toward a specific, and usually rare, case. However, there was one very good issue brought up in this Q&A session with regards to shipping rates in conjunction with localization. Since shipping rates factor into the final cost of a product, there are many stores which have different shipping rates for different regions of the country or in the world. First, the shopping search engines don’t differentiate between different shipping rates. And, second, if/when they do, they must consider that if they were to locally do a reverse DNS lookup in conjunction with a user’s physical location, considerations must be made for those who may be in, say Las Vegas for a conference, when they actually live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I thought this was a great topic that touched on a few different areas of improvement for the shopping search engine industry.
All in all, a pretty good day – I got a touch of a nap in earlier, and got some good sushi in me, so I’m definitely ready for the Yahoo! Party at the Palms. Supposedly, they’re giving chips to play with – I wonder if we get to keep our winnings. Regardless, I definitely keep finding new symbolisms in Internet marketing and Las Vegas.
WebSourced to Merge with MarketSmart and Create Complete Marketing & Advertising Solution CGI Holding, the parent company of WebSourced, Inc. (who provide search engine marketing solutions via KeywordRanking), today announced its intent to merge MarketSmart into its business. MarketSmart is one of the south's leading marketing, advertising and public relations firms with more than 45 employees and big name clients, including Subway.
The intended merger will see WebSourced and MarketSmart combine services to become the first company able to "close the loop" and offer full, turnkey marketing and advertising solutions. The two companies will be able to provide services that will bridge the gap of online and offline marketing.
Gerard M. Jacobs, the Company's CEO, stated "The MarketSmart Companies are all about highly professional, extremely talented people making it happen for their clients. We are excited about the prospect of Greg Cox, Lewis Finch and Steve Thanhauser becoming our partners in helping us build a worldwide leader in offline and online marketing, advertising and public relations. This merger will allow our WebSourced subsidiary and MarketSmart to significantly expand their client bases, by providing compelling, cost-effective online and offline marketing services."
Steven "Pat" Martin, the CEO of the Company's WebSourced subsidiary, stated, “Combining MarketSmart’s traditional advertising and marketing with WebSourced’s search engine marketing services will allow us to offer a truly integrated service. We already believe that WebSourced provides online marketing services that offer unmatched levels of return-on-investment; by joining with MarketSmart, we will be able to offer our clients a heuristic, impartial view of their complete campaign.” Martin added, “Never before has a search engine marketing company been able to offer truly compelling offline marketing services. WebSourced and MarketSmart will emerge as a new leader in both interactive marketing and traditional advertising.”
Steven Thanhauser, the CEO of the MarketSmart Companies, stated, "We are so excited with the natural symbiotic relationship that will take place with WebSourced and MarketSmart when this merger occurs. It is incredibly powerful and trendsetting for the advertising industry. Combining MarketSmart's traditional “offline” full service agency strengths with the WebSourced “online” services will allow us to offer a turnkey solution for a much broader range of clients."
The closing of the proposed transaction is subject to the satisfaction of a number of conditions, including the execution of definitive merger and employment agreements, the completion of audits of the MarketSmart Companies, and other customary conditions. Andy Beal
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Overture Testing RSS Ads
John Battelle has details on efforts by Overture to distribute ads in RSS feeds.
Note to Google. I have thousands of people subscribing to this blog's RSS feed. Current options to add RSS ads involve having to tweak my RSS feed and use redirects. How about giving me the option to include AdWords ads in my Blogger RSS feed and we'll share the revenue? Andy Beal
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New Efforts to Optimize Flash Content for Search Engines Matt Hicks reports from the WebmasterWorld conference on efforts by George Shaw to get Flash content optimized and into the search engines.
While demand remains high for Flash-based sites in industries such as entertainment, which want to display multimedia, the lack of full search-engine support creates roadblocks, the designers said.
"The only issue we're running into is verifiability of the content," Shaw said. "It's a trust issue at this point. The search engines need to trust that the content they're searching is the same as the Flash [sites] are displaying."
In other words, the SEs have been burned by cloaking in the past and it's going to take a lot to convince them that they won't get burned by this initiative. If standards can be agreed on, Flash optimization might stand a chance. Andy Beal
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November 16, 2004
WebmasterWorld of Search Conference, Day 1
The sun arose early on the valley of Las Vegas and into the rooms of dreary eyed conference goers on this day, the first day, of the WebmasterWorld of Search Conference. With the legendary late-night bar conversations that this conference, the conference formerly known as PubCon, is reknowned for, this will probably be the last decent night of sleep that many of these 1,000 attendees will get.
Today’s sessions, as with most conference first-day sessions, are relatively light. Alternatively, the day’s sessions do not seem light to accentuate the progression of the conference, rather, it seems the first day’s sessions have been kept light to keep the first day a bit more relaxed to promote networking and to begin picking out those familiar faces you saw at the last conference.
Opening Keynote by Brett Tabke:
About 25 minutes long, the keynote certainly opened with the community feel that WebmasterWorld holds dear to its heart. If you were expecting to hear about the future of Search, online businesses, or independent webmasters/publishers, think again. This keynote was for the community of members that were in attendance.
The first 15 minutes opened with very gracious thanks to all of the attendees, several members who worked diligently behind the scenes, and the sponsors who helped make the WebmasterWorld of Search Conference the largest conference ever held by WebmasterWorld.
Following that, Brett reviewed some highlights of the conference, and offered some information and advice on the sessions for the upcoming days, including touching on the daily “Super Sessions,” where that is the only session going on at that time.
Overall, a very warm opening.
Big Site Promotion:
I first want to preface this session with that I felt it was the most valuable session of the day. Now, today’s super session on the history of search optimization was absolutely great to listen to, but I truly felt that the Big Site Promotion session had four solid panelists all giving excellent information on how to optimize for large sites. What I’m about to write only scratches the surface of this discussion.
Marshall Simmonds started off discussing the search optimization strategies he has been using on About.com for a few years now. The majority of his presentation centered around two things: 1, Natural Search is a long term strategy, and 2, communicating the right messages throughout an organization in order to effectively execute a large, site-wide Natural Search campaign. While he states that communication is the first of five main hurdles, he re-emphasized the need to effectively communicate each of the other four messages throughout the organization.
Marshall broke out the main five areas of concern, and how to address those concerns. They are:
Communication - Get everyone in the organization to move in the same direction and constantly repeat that message.
Design - Effectively clean up code throughout the site. Clean up the templates, remove any unnecessary code, reference JavaScript, CSS, and other code externally.
Relevance - Educate the organization on the basics of Natural Search optimization, especially keyword analysis. Also educate the organization as to what not to do, and other potential spam issues. Make use of unique, relevant intro text on all pages, and make sure all links have relevant text annotations.
Visibility - Bottom line: If the search engines can’t see the site, you can’t be ranked.
Metrics - Record baselines and define, measure, and monitor any and all change.
John Marshall, of ClickTracks fame, was up next. His presentation was relatively short, but emphasized two things: 1, The problem with large sites is not the data size, but the large number of visitors. With such high numbers of visitors, the slightest change can have the greatest positive impact…or it can have the greatest negative impacts. 2, The challence is making the data recorded persuasive in a manner that creates effective decisions to be made.
John also recommended three books by Edward Tufte, for those who may want to get heavy into metrics, available at edwardtufte.com, the main one being The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
Joseph Morin was up next, and defined three key things that I think all website owners should be aware of:
Affiliates Drive Leads
PPC Drives Leads
SEO Drives Page Views
This definition was relevant in that he currently works on AutoByTel.com and other properties it owns. Some of the sites’ goals are to generate leads, while others are to generate page views for ad revenue. Knowing what your goal is, and the best way to achieve that goal, is essential.
Additionally, Joseph noted that making changes to large websites is often a tough ordeal. In order to best get the changes you feel are going to be valuable, implemented, he suggests completing a proof of concept on another property, or section of a website, measuring the results, communicating the effectiveness of the results, and finally implementing those changes on the other, usually more valuable/larger, sites.
Finally, Joseph presented what I feel is a very innovative idea for larger sites in that he recommended that horizontal channels be built once vertical channels have been fully executed. Deciding which horizontal channels to begin pursuing first, may be as easy as looking at the current keyword traffic that doesn’t fit into a business’s current model, but molding parts of the business to begin taking advantage of that horizontal channel. It’s certainly a great argument for those website owners who want to strictly stay in a “luxury” or “cheap” or whatever market. If the traffic is there, the business is there, and you should be there, too.
Bill Hunt, to me, presented some of the most valuable information in this session. This was an absolute gem:
IBM had a mere 10,000 pages indexed by the search engines. By only making search engine visibility (infrastructure, architectural, or whatever your word du jour is) changes, 2.2 million pages were then indexed. This directly correlated to an increase of 67% in overall traffic
AMAZING.
He went on to discuss that typical Natural Search campaigns are executed from the top down; content, coding, then infrastructure. This is reversed when working with very large sites, you’re much more effective to work from the bottom, up.
Tracking, Conversion, and ROI Testing
This session seemed to be more of instructions on how to use Urchin, ClickTracks, and Alexa to gather the information you needed – if you don’t use those tools, or use other tools, the session may not have been of too much value. However, there were some excellent conversations with Brett Crosby (Urchin) and John Marshall (ClickTracks) after the session about traffic analytics and discussions on the philosophy of limitations of, or attempts at, making intuitive assumptions using l
TradeMark Infringement
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Gary Stein 
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We were a little perplexed when we saw iProspect's announcement that all of their PPC staff had been given the new Google Advertising Professionals certification. Had they built a time-machine to avoid the 90-day mandatory period, before becoming certified?
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The affiliate smack down had a lot of great information for both marketers and affiliate managers. It was very much a sex, drugs, and rock and roll session; no holds barred. Oh, and apparently gay porn sells well in the UK market.
This closing session did an excellent job of outlining, and explaining how to address, common problems with small Internet marketing firms. If I had to pick one thing that best summed up the session, it would be: You have to do more than just take care of your customers.
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