Ever wonder what the biggest SEO myths are? I have taken the most prevalent myths that seem to be constantly resurfacing and examined them for you. This is a must read for anyone looking to hire an SEO firm or someone looking to do SEO for themselves.
As search innovation rolls out to the user, the beta release has been a tried and true way of testing the waters. Currently, there are dozens of different flavors of search in beta, including a significant portion of Google usability. Beta releases were originally a quality assurance exercise, allowing real users to identify bugs in a new product.
Today, the advantage of beta in search is that it's a relatively low risk way to test the appeal of new search functionality and interfaces with real users. Beta release is to technology as a test market is to advertising. A beta interface can be thrown up without impacting the main site, which continues to produce the bread and butter revenue. The hope is, of course, that word of the beta will spread virally through the internet and the developer will find their beta release turns into the next big thing online. You pretest with users, find you have a home run, and when the time is right, you throw the switch, incorporating some or all of the new technology into your mainstream product.
Google's latest update Big Daddy continues to cause problems for some webmasters.
On the popular WebmasterWorld forum, many webmasters have reported that all of their web pages except for their index page have been moved to Google's supplemental index.
Could the Sports Illustrated Jinx, where teams and athletes featured on the cover famously flounder soon after publication; have spread to their fellow Time, Inc. weekly Time Magazine? This week the boys from Google are gracing Time's cover and from their easy smiles (and a byline that mentions Internet domination) you'd think that the transformation is complete: Google has finally 'pwned' us all! Well, a theory that there is some kind of jinx fits because Google seems to be getting it from all angles now. But with all the piling on, it's important to remember that Google's core business, search advertising, is still very much a winner.
Barry Diller likes long shots. He's built a career betting on the long shot. Climbing from the mail room of the William Morris agency to network exec was business as usual for Diller. Taking ABC from a perpetual also-ran to challenge the dominance of CBS and NBC was not out of the realm of the doable. And Diller's Fox is the once impossible fourth network. So, don't be too quick to bet against him.
Today, Diller is stacking his chips for a run at the lucrative search market, and he�s betting that history can repeat itself. Fresh from killing off his venerable butler, Jeeves, Diller showcased the new Ask.com at the New York Search Engine Strategies show.
At the recent Wharton Technology Conference in Philadelphia representatives from Google, Yahoo and MSN Search discussed the future of search technologies.
The big search engine companies have different ideas on how search engines will change over the next few years.
In November I wrote an article and referenced a trip that ICMediaDirect.com's VP of Business Development, Diana Lee, took to China. She participated in Shanghai's inaugural ad:tech conference. It was a great trip and our company's ties with China are stronger because of it. Like most Western companies doing business in China, we're just doing business and there are no extenuating circumstances. Google, the giant search engine, cannot say the same.
China is an economic giant warming up to the power of the Internet, but this hasn't been a perfect marriage so far. Centralized power and the decentralized nature of the Internet do not mesh well. Beijing feels compelled to exercise tight control over whatever flow of information they can in order to stifle potential dissent within Chinese society. A governmental missive from 2000 states plainly that Internet providers must restrict information that may 'harm the dignity and interests of the state'. And it is into the centrally run, Communist waters that Google waded into last week as they introduced their localized Chinese search engine, Google.cn.
I was at SES in New York last year and I was amazed at how many people it drew. This year I was unable to attend but have been keeping up with the sessions on various blogs and industry news sites, but it sounds like it was bigger than ever.
One thing that struck me is how the focus seems to be finally shifting from techniques and tactics to a more rounded approach where the user actually plays a part.
Imagine that? The search user is actually beginning to impact how we perform search engine marketing.
I was checking our referrer stats and noticed quite a few queries lately relating to how Google makes money. In fact many of the queries are 'how does google make money'. So I thought I'd write this article explaining what it is that Google does that makes them so much money.
In 2005 Google's revenues were over $6 billion on which they earned about $1.5 million in net income. This is a far cry from larger companies like ExxonMobile which made over $25 billion profit.
Search is rapidly turning from the darling of the internet to a demon. The latest attack, brought about by search's phenomenal financial success, is that search is sucking all the value out of millions of websites by scraping content in bite sized pieces and doling it out to searchers, at the same time monetizing traffic that's being create by value created by the site owners, not the search engine.
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen ran a post on his site a few weeks back (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html) taking the engines to task for fostering dependency on search traffic, while at the same time enjoying the impact of ever escalating bid prices. A few analysts have also started to intimate that perhaps it's time for marketers, especially those in direct response, to look beyond search as click prices move the cost per acquisition beyond what's reasonable.