Technology Tips » Search Engines

MyBlogLog: A Marketing Tool

topcat — Sat, 05 May 2007 22:31:06 +0000

By now, more than 120,000 people have joined MyBlogLog. What’s so great/interesting/useful about this site? To me, it’s a great marketing tool in several ways:

1. When you visit a site that has the the MyBlogLog widget installed, they’ll see that I visited their site, and they will likely visit (at the minimum) my profile page in return.

2. When I join other communities and add MyBlogLogers as my contacts, they will see that I have joined them, and they will likely come back and visit. Better yet, other people who belong to the same communities/have the same contacts will Join other communities and add others as contacts.

3. Follow some people and see what communities they join, especially the people who are blogging about the same thing as you are. Pretty soon you’ll also know what are the top sites in your niche.

All of the methods mentioned above are open to abuse — you just can open a new window everytime you go to a new site without actually viewing the site content, or you can just join all the communities you see and add everyone as your contact. However, it’s pretty easy to see who are the “community whores” and “contact whores”, and people will simply stop at your profile page and not go visit your site at all.

Browser Market Share, March 2007

topcat — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 03:41:04 +0000

Here is the browser market share for March 2007, based on traffic to my top site:

IE: 65.45%
Firefox: 31.05%
Opera: 1.89%
Safari: 0.66%
Mozilla: 0.62%

During March, Firefox gained 0.66%, and the gain came mostly at the expense of IE, which lost 0.59% during the same time. The smaller browsers pretty much remained unchanged compared to February.

Yahoo Now Supports ‘NOYDIR’ Meta Tag

topcat — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 04:55:12 +0000

Yahoo Search announced today that it is supporting the NOYDIR meta tag, which will allow webmasters full control over the title and description of their sites.� Currently, if a site is included in the Yahoo Directory, Yahoo Search will always display the title and description stored in the Yahoo Direcotory, which may be out of sync with what the site has currently.

It will be interesting to see how much effect this change has on the rankigns of the sites currently in the Yahoo Directory.� My initial guess is that most site might see a slight enhancement in their rankings because the title and description Yahoo uses� should now be� more relevant.

[Updated on March 1, 2007] One day after including the “NOYDIR” meta tag, I found that the title and description of my sites have changed, although it has little impact on the rankings.

“Miserable Failure” search no longer points to Bush’s official site

topcat — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 06:30:51 +0000

The top search result for “miserable failure” on Google no longer points to George Bush’s official website at whitehouse.gov.� The previous result came about as many webmasters purposely linked to the whitehouse.gov site with the anchor text of “miserable failure”.� The Google search engine, which places a lot of importance in the anchor text, went on and placed Bush’s site as the top search result for that query, even though neither “miserable” nor “failure” appear anywhere in Bush’s site itself.

By the way,� this change� happened as Google updated its algorithm, not as a result of some type of manual adjustment.

This� has been� the example I would use when I� want to emphasize the importance of anchor text.� Now I’ll have to find another example…

It’s now OK to run Adsense with other contextual ad programs

topcat — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 21:11:23 +0000

Jennifer Slegg reported in Jensense.com that she has confirmed with the Google Adsense team that it’s now okay to run Adsense on the same page with other contexual ad programs, provided that they do not resemble or mimic Adsense ads. She also wrote that Adsnese policy will eventually be updated to reflect this change.

Relaxing this restriction shows that Google is confident that Adsense is superior to the other contextual ad programs out there. It remains to be seen that other contextual ad programs, most notably YPN, will relax their own restrictions.

List of Official Google Blogs

topcat — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:45:47 +0000

Today Danny Sullivan posted an entry in SearchEngineWatch that lists all official Google blogs. Coincidentally, this is a piece of information I’ve been looking for myself. The links listed in that post were XML files, which are difficult to read for most of us. So, I am listing these sites in a more friendly format below:

New search engine Zotspot pays users to search

topcat — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 22:13:14 +0000

Yesterday Zotspot announced the official launch of its search engine.� What’s different about this search engine is that it is paying users to search.� Users may also donate the money they earned to charities.� Users can also earn money from referrals.

Zotspot was tight-lipped in terms of how much money you can expect to earn.� � It did say that clicking on results will have no direct impact on earnings.� � The only estimate provided by the site was that a referral will likely generated between $0.10 and $0.50 per year.� � While this is a low� amount, it does� mean that this is not one of those “too good to be true” offers that invariably fail.

As far as search quality, Zotspot will only say that its search results “are powered by one of the best search engines on the planet.”� I did some test queries on Zotspot and compared the results to the 4 top search engines in the US, and found that Zotspot’s results are different from all 4 (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com).� Based on my limited data set, I would say Zotspot’s results are closest to those of Google.� This is a good start for Zotspot, as search quality will eventually be the key factor in determining whether people will switch.

Google asking for feedback on Adsense / Google Analytics

topcat — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:00:20 +0000

Google is soliciting feedback on how Google Analytics can help webmasters be successful in AdSense.� � The feedback is running on Google Groups, so you’ll need a Google account (if you are using Google Analytics, you already have one), and your comment will be public.

Back in SES San Jose, I� asked some of� the Google people on� the possibility of tracking AdSesne clicks within Google Analytics.� At that time, I did not get anything definitive.� I am glad to see that� Google is offering this ability now.� � Personally, I’d like to see� how� clicks on Adsense ads� correlate to the entry source (referring domain, keywords, etc).� That� type of information would be very helpful� in telling� webmasters which channels� they should focus on� optimizing.

Danny Sullivan announces his plans for 2007

topcat — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 22:27:54 +0000

Danny Sullivan announced his plans for 2007 in his blog today.� In short, he will participate in next year’s SES conferences, although� in a decreasing role with each one (chair of SES NY in April 2007, co-chair of SES SJ in August 2007, and consulting for SES Chicago in December 2007).� For Search Engine Watch, Danny’s last day is still November 30, 2006.

This is definitely good news for the industry in the short run, as Danny will stay involved with� SES,� which should ensure that SES is staying on course.� In the long run, it appears that 2007 will be a transition year for him, and that come 2008, he’ll most likely be doing something on his own.� This should� allow him some time to carefully plan out his next steps.

Comparing Personalized Homepages

topcat — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 03:47:03 +0000

I have tried out the personalized home page option for the 3 major sites:� Google, MSN (My MSN), and Yahoo (My Yahoo).� All three do a good job to allow you to set up page(s) where you can see the information you care on a single page, and users can easily add/modify/delete content on all 3.� Here I will focus on the� differences among the three.� I will also list recommendations on which one to use based on which criteria you value the most.

Differences

Below are features that are different among the three:

Presence of ad banner:� Google and� MSN do not have ad banners, while Yahoo does.

Default content selection:� Yahoo and Google have plenty of� default contents to choose from.� MSN lags behind in this� area.

Method of navigating between different pages:� Google uses a tab, while Yahoo and MSN use a drop down box.

Number of columns:� � Yahoo allows either 2 or 3 columns; Google allows a maximum of 3 columns; MSN has no limit.

Column width adjustment:� MSN allows users to adjust column width� by dragging the border.� On the other hand, it does not� adjust the column widths when the size of the browser window is changed. � Yahoo and Google do not allow users to adjust column width by dragging the border,� but column widths are automatically adjusted to fit the browser window.

How available content is displayed:� MSN shows the title; Yahoo shows the title and description; Google shows a title plus a picture.

Add content by RSS feed:� Although all 3 have this functionality, I had a difficult time setting up some feeds with MSN.� Yahoo and Google worked fine.

Change background colors:� This is available in Yahoo and MSN, but not in Google.

Ability to search for content:� Yahoo and Google both provide good results when I was searching for new content to add.� MSN lags behind in this area.

Game content display:� Google actually shows the game window on� the page, so I can play Sudoku or Pacman� directly on the� personalized home page.� Yahoo and MSN both provide just links.

Recommendations

As you can see, there are many differences, and which one to� use is largely a personal preference.� If you

a) Want a wide selection of content to choose from:� Go with Yahoo or Google.

b) Need to personalize the color scheme:� Go with Yahoo or MSN.

c) Like pictures:� Go with Google.

d) Want to be able to play games directly on the� your page:� Go with Google.

e) Don’t mind using the default colors, and like to use tabs to navigate between pages:� Go with Google.

f) Like to have 4 or more columns:� Go with MSN.

g) Want to search for new content:� Go with Yahoo or Google.

h) Hate ad banners:� Go with MSN or Google.