It’s all go go go in Search Engine Land.
July 21, 2008 | Google, Keyword Research, Live (MSN), Search Engine News, Yahoo
Everything’s kicking off in Search Engine Land and it isn’t just in the boardroom:
First we had the on-off Yahoo - Microsoft Deal.
Then we had the Yahoo - Google deal.
Microsoft has since bought Powerset
Yahoo shareholder Carl Icahn is trying to oust the whole Yahoo board that resembles all the best plots from Eastenders rolled into one which will play out on the 1st August at a shareholder meeting
Yahoo and Microsoft are placing themselves in the best position to buy AOL, which is partly owned by Google, give all the fallout of the above.
Phew! As if that isn’t enough boardroom shenanighans all three companies haven’t forgot what they normally do - Search:
Microsoft has been working on AdLabs, feedback I’ve read says the advertising platform is much improved, so much so that Companies who run PPC for clients are beginning to see Live starting to overtake Yahoo as the next best thing after Adsense.
Yahoo has recently bought analytics company Indextools to compete with Google Analytics.
Google seem remarkably good at forgetting what there best at and want to be better at everything else too but still have that incredibly annoying nack of still having their core service performing outstandingly. We’ve had amongst many things the continuing development of various software tools such as Google Docs, forays into the mobile phone market with Android, we’ve had Google launching a new virtual world called Lively, we’ve had Google webinars and…
Last but by no means least we had the change to the Adsense platform where Google are now giving actual figures on keywords research. Keyword Research is critical to every project we do and is always the first stage of any project. We’d be stuffed without it, optimising a keyword is easy, ok it’s not as easy as all that i hear you say, but the point is what do you optimise for? This is why doing research is so important. There are a number of keywords tools. As I’ve mentioned before Microsoft have launched Adlabs which is mightily impressive and at the moment looks far better than anything the other two are doing, however Live has about a 5% market share, 10% if were being generous. Ultimately doesn’t matter how great a tool is you can’t optimise something in Google (70% market) with figures from MSN. Now Google give us the figures we can do exactly that.
Previously using overture data (Yahoo PPC) was the next best thing until they stopped running actual figures live and changed it for something far less superior, they do still run figures people keep telling me, yes they do but I kindly point out they’re from Jan 07, that is they’re not live, be interesting to see what Yahoo will now do, give that the other two now run live figures.
Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are other popular tools, however if you want to optimise for Google your better of using AdLabs given the market share. Both give out a plethora of bizarre keywords combinations that make it very difficult to actually work out what terms people are using in Google. People tell me Keyword Discovery is good but it’s so US biased that us poor folks in the UK can’t really tell how good it supposedly is, personally I doubt it!
The feedback so far is that figures are very accurate. One thing I know, it makes my life a lot easier.
Yahoo reacts to shareholder criticism
July 7, 2008 | Google, Search Engine News, Yahoo
Further from our post about Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo and the consequent fallout, Yahoo have responded to shareholder criticism in true Multi-national fashion by creating a Powerpoint presentation.
You can read the full the presentation here, what it says makes fascinating reading and if you’ve been following things closely what it doesn’t say even more so!
Particularly the agreement with Google with regard to Yahoo carrying Google’s PPC, Adsense. It confirms our original opinion that basically Google will make money out of this deal, Yahoo will make money out of this deal and Live are screwed! Yahoo announced pretty pronto after the deal was dead the other deal with Google, yet we’re know told that Yahoo are still open to a deal with Microsoft.
Given the Google deal goes through are Yahoo now telling me that Google are happy to have it’s adds carried on a Microsoft owned Yahoo, whereas I know Google aren’t stupid and having agreed the deal with Yahoo there would have more than likely been something in the agreement about the ownership of Yahoo, ironic that to me the Google deal means the death of the Microsoft deal and in fact that’s exactly what happened.
Yahoo even present a hybrid of what an actual page of results would look like which looks nice for the stockholders but is rather misleading. Basically someone goes to Yahoo and does a search if they’re not interested in anything yahoo has to offer, that is is either Organic and PPC then Yahoo appends Adsense adds where no-one really bothers looking.
Umm, it’s here that contradictions really appear. Originally when the Yahoo - Google deal broke an exec was quoted saying it would make them an extra $800 million. Now they’re saying it’s between $250 - $400 million. Now a little recalculation and more detailed look at the figures and we’d expect a drop a little but $400m. What we want to know is what the exec who quoted $800m was on as we would like some?
Originally Yahoo admitted that Adsense would be displayed because no-one really bids on long tail keywords and Asense has them in abundance, or basically Yahoo makes very little on something Google has cornered the market in, in which case the proposed Adsense adds would ,at the very least, be appearing much higher, even as high as the top positions in some cases. In fact if we were to take what was originally said at face value they’d be the only PPC add’s.
Forget what Yahoo say, they know what people are bidding on, in the Yahoo network, call it ‘x’. They will take a percentage cut of any Adsense keyword, lets call it ‘y’. So if y makes Yahoo more money than x which adds are they likely to carry?
Finally we’ve done the testing and we’ve seen other tests, The fact is Search Engine Users don’t pay much attention to PPC Adds beyond the top two or three positions which are directly, above organic listings, in fact we know this is a fact as we’ve seen it applied over a number of different sciences
Now we don’t think Yahoo are that stupid, although their shareholders may disagree, but we know and we know that Yahoo know that actually where they’re saying they are placing the Google adds now won’t make them anything near $250m per year.
Google Hosting Free Webmaster Webinar
July 4, 2008 | Google, Search Engine News
Google will be hosting a free webinar for webmasters on 8th July. The webinar will cover three key Google products; Webmaster Tools, Analytics and Website Optimiser. To find out more information or register click the “free webinar” link.
Spidering Flash: Adobe working with Yahoo and Google
July 3, 2008 | Google, Search Engine News, Yahoo
In case you didn’t know if you have a flash web site it’s invisible to search engines. Your site is pretty near impossible to rank in Search Engines that dominate over half the traffic on the web - That’s the bad news!
The good news is both Yahoo and Google are working with Abobe to improve searchability with flash. For an official view:
“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files. Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now can help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing content better.”
Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering, Google
“Yahoo is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.”
Sean Suchter, vice president, Yahoo Search technology engineering.
So, as with all things news related we post, the question is what this means for users?
For all more accurate results if flash sites are included. There is the possibility in the immediate future that both Search Engines will begin to include both sites that are flash based and improvements in rankings for those with some flash on them. Our opinion is if your serious about ranking and benefiting from the enormous amount of traffic that Search Engines bring, then the less flash the better. I can’t see vast improvements except in the long term but we shall have to wait and see.
In fact why have flash at all? We recently started a job where only the main navigation links were embedded in flash, not much really, however the net result is quite serious. The holy grail of Google optimisation, Page Rank was greatly effected. A homepage with actually a decent Page Rank couldn’t pass on it’s PR to other important pages which resulted in a PR of 0 for all sub pages, not all the pages are indexed and ultimately Googlebot doesn’t visit very often, its sure makes our job a lot harder. This is where we may see short improvements, in that Google and Yahoo should both soon start picking up these links and hopefully these problems will be a thing of the past.
That means better PR, better spiderability and more visits from Googlebot. Hopefully! Watch this space!
Yahoo would rather dance with Google than Live!
July 1, 2008 | Google, Live (MSN), Search Engine News, Yahoo
Unless you’ve been in a monastery you’ll already know that Microsoft recently tried to purchase all or part of Yahoo. What you may not know that as soon as the deal was dead, with both companies announcing that actually hell would all but freeze over before that would happen, Yahoo announced a deal with both companies chief rival, Google to carry Google’s PPC platform, Adsense. This news has been met by a mainly negative response from the industry with the average commentator alarmed at how Google may dominate the Search Market even more than it does now.
Both companies seem all set for this to go through and announced they would give US Governement watchdogs three months to go over the deal and approve it. But what does this mean for us users?
If the deal does go ahead we will see something that rarely happens, that is two industry giants co-operating in a joint venture. More than co-operating, they seem to be on a joint mission to all put extinguish Microsoft from the Search Market altogether. In terms of developing their services we’ve seen much activity from all three major engines recently in terms of Adlabs, Analytics and ventures into the mobile phone market.
It will be fascinating to see how this plays out, Yahoo has been much criticised by it’s shareholders, with Yahoo executives also dropping like flies, with one recent ex-Yahoo employee recently joining Russian search engine Yandex. Ultimately it seems Yahoo are happy to play second fiddle to Google and top of both companies Christmas list is the wish for Live to all but disappear.
It also surprised me to learn recently that actually Google will soon overtake Microsoft in stature, given the dominance of Microsoft in the PC market, this says more about not only how Google dominates it’s prime market but also about how successful Google has been as it’s spread it’s wings into other fields.
