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Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don'ts

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:52:13 -0500

It's easy for businesses to get caught up in Google's expectations for their sites, when trying to market through search. That's certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google dominates the search market by a huge margin. Still, there are other search engines that people are using, and it is also wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too.

I'm obviously talking about Yahoo and Bing, but Yahoo's share is declining, while Bing's is gaining. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway.

Do you take Bing into account when optimizing your site? Comment here.

We don't hear as much about what Bing wants out of a site for rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don'ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for honoring Bing's policy, does not differ too much from advice that Google would give you. It is, however, still always nice to see how they feel, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. "Just don't make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," says DeJarnette. "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."

What Not To Do

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

1. The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

2. Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

3. Using hidden links in your pages

4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web

5. Linking out to known web spam sites

"When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction," says DeJarnette. "If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index."

What To Do

DeJarnette also shared some tips for getting more quality links. Following are Bing's tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

1. Develop your site as a business brand and brand it consistently

2. Find relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media folk, and make sure they're aware of your site/content

3. Publish concise, informative press releases online

4. Publish expert articles to online article directories

5. Participate in relevant conversations on blogs/forums, referring back to your site's content when applicable

6. Use social networks to connect to industry influencers (make sure you have links to your site in your profiles)

7. Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content

8. Launch a blog/forum on your site

9. Participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums

10. Strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry, while promoting your site

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any savvy search marketer is not already aware of. That said, there are clearly plenty of online (and offline for that matter) businesses out there that don't have savvy search marketers on the payroll. It can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and what not to do to help webmasters get better rankings.

Related Articles:

> What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO

> Don't Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing

> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?

Facebook Stock Maneuver Feeds IPO Rumors

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:27:41 -0500

Consider yourself forewarned: the official line is that "Facebook has no plans to go public at this time." Just the same, a financial maneuver the company's performing has raised a few eyebrows since it seems to point towards that possibility.

Jessica E. Vascellaro reported this afternoon, "The company is in the process of converting all current shareholders to Class B stock, which carries ten times the voting power of Class A stock . . . . Those shares will remain Class B shares unless the owner sells them during an initial public offering, at which time they will become Class A shares . . ."

This sort of exercise helps ensure that existing stockholders retain control of a company regardless of what happens on an open market. In Facebook's case, Mark Zuckerberg, who owns many, many shares, would benefit most. (Important note: It's not necessarily an "evil" move, though, as Google did the same sort of thing for the sake of Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt.)

So what we have here is one more piece of evidence (remember the preexisting enthusiasm surrounding its stock?) that Facebook could be headed towards an IPO.

Even if Facebook doesn't have definite plans to go public, the recession at least hasn't completely scared the company away from the idea, then.

Related Articles:

> (Private) Facebook Shares Up 42% In Four Months

> Facebook Catapults Into Third Place Among Video Sites

> Facebook Most Widely Used Network Among Businesses

Yahoo Survey Finds Optimism for Holiday Online Retail

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:59:40 -0500

Yahoo conducted a survey of small business online retailers to find out how they think they'll perform this upcoming holiday season compared to previous years.

"Surprisingly, based on the current economic landscape, the results show an optimistic outlook, with over 60 percent of the Yahoo! merchants surveyed expecting sales to be the same as most years or even stronger," a representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews.

"Only 25% expected sales to be weaker than most years (with the remaining 15% expecting sales to be weaker than most years but stronger than last year)," she adds. "After last year in which sales were plagued by the recession, this holiday season just may shape up to mark a rebound of sorts for small business online retailers."

Some other findings from the survey include:

- The most optimistic industries are beauty and fragrances; clothing, accessories & shoes; and food – in all cases more than 40 percent think this will be a stronger year than most years.

- Several industries feel sales will be back to normal this season after being way down last year, including books and magazines, electronics, and music.

- These sectors tend to include lower cost gift options than some of the more pessimistic sectors such as computers & hardware (in which only 6% expect this year to be stronger than most years and 64% expect sales to be weaker than most years).

A recent survey from Google found that by last week, half of consumers had already begun holiday shopping. However, research from MerchantCircle found that only about 23% of merchants believe the worst of the recession is behind us.

Related Articles:

> Holiday Shoppers Want Deals Even More Than They Did Last Year

> More People Plan To Shop Online During The Holidays

> Good Chunk of Holiday Spending Will Be Online

Retailers Funneling More Money To Bing

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:27:53 -0500

Bing has managed to turn retailers' heads in a big way. After looking at statistics from part of 2008, SearchIgnite reported that retailers spent almost 50 percent more with Microsoft's search engine this time around, which puts Google and Yahoo partly to shame.

Or, to be more precise, "Retailers have spent 47% more on search ads on Bing in Q4 this year than during this same time period in 2008," according to SearchIgnite. "Compared with Google and Yahoo!, Bing also saw better YoY click volume growth."

Additionally, "[a]verage order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines, which could account for the spend growth."

Impressive, right? It's only when you sort of step back for a moment that Bing's achievements look less stunning. That's because, despite the progress Microsoft has made, exactly 75 percent of advertisers' dollars went to Google during the first part of this quarter, and 16 percent headed to Yahoo. Bing grabbed just 8 percent.

Still, some headway is better than none, and retailers are demonstrating a lot of confidence in Bing by giving it a try during the all-important holiday season.

Related Articles:

> Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Some Bing Users Seeing Latest Posts On Publisher Searches

Yahoo Suggests Searchers Use Other Yahoo Properties

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:25:16 -0500

Yahoo has started rolling out some new Search Assist features for its web search boxes. They are present in the search boxes of most Yahoo properties. For example, you can find them on Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, or Yahoo Finance.

"These new features can take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers," explains Yahoo Search Senior Product Manager Linda Wang. "You can also get enhanced search suggestions and easily navigate to the Yahoo! property that fits your needs the most."

The features allow you to quickly get more info about movies, sports, travel destinations, stock prices, etc. For instance, you can type a stock symbol and the Search Assist layer will display real-time stock quotes, links to stock charts, and news about the company. Or you can type an athlete's name and quickly get news, game log info, scores, schedules, etc.

In addition to these features, Yahoo has also launched the ability for Search Assist to help you navigate to different Yahoo properties, depending on your query. Let's say you type "mail" in the search box. You will get a link to Yahoo Mail - specifically, your inbox, right in the Search Assist layer. Or you can type "news" or "U.S. News" and get a link to Yahoo News or specifically the U.S. section of Yahoo News.

Finally, Yahoo has added a "smart detection system" to Search Assist, which will take you to Yahoo Image Search or Yahoo News Search for different queries. So if you searched for "obama," you would get quick links to an "obama" image query and an "obama" news query.

It's hard to say how long these features will be around if Yahoo's deal with Microsoft goes through. Bing should be replacing Yahoo search on the back-end. This might be considered a front-end frill that Yahoo keeps around though.

Related Articles:

> Following Study, Yahoo Proud Of Search Assist

> Yahoo's Search Assist is There When you Need It

> Are You Fatigued By Search?

Two More Publishers Talk About Blocking Google

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:20:45 -0500

A couple of major publishers are siding with (or at least edging towards) Rupert Murdoch in the News Corp./Google content dispute. MediaNews Group and A.H. Belo execs have said that they're interested in keeping Google away from parts of their sites.

Let's talk about MediaNews Group first. It operates 54 daily newspapers with a combined daily circulation of 2.4 million. Corresponding websites are part of the mix, as are a TV station and some radio stations.

As for the organization's take on blocking Google, CEO Dean Singleton told Greg Bensinger and Brian Womack that some pay walls are going up next year, and "[t]he things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic."

Then there's A.H. Belo to consider. It owns and operates four papers and 12 sites, and is weighing a similar approach. Only Executive Vice President James Moroney seemed less than interested in search traffic, saying, "It's akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer."

The idea of keeping Google away from content appears to be gaining a bit of momentum, then, and with some additional prodding from Microsoft, Rupert Murdoch's idea could go further than critics first expected.

Related Articles:

> Is The Murdoch Bing Deal Really Just About The Wall Street Journal?

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

Black Friday 2009: The Best Deals On The Items You Want

Jeremy Muncy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:39:18 -0500

Is there a better way to kick off the Holiday season then slowly dragging yourself out of your tryptophan induced coma to go shopping during the wee hours of the day after Thanksgiving a.k.a. Black Friday?

Sure, Black Friday seems utterly atrocious when thinking about it. I mean you got long lines, rabid shoppers, insane traffic, and bitterly cold weather. Mix that with sleep deprivation and you get a very lethal cocktail of insanity. So why do people put themselves through this monotony?

Well the answer to that is quite easy: It’s the deals.

Although Black Friday got its start sometime during the 1960s, online deals didn't come into play until around 2000. The reasoning for this was that most people had very slow dial-up connections at home, which made online purchases more of an annoyance, then a convenience. Most people would wait until the following Monday, when they returned to work, to do there online shopping. Utilizing the faster connection of the workplace, people would do their online shopping, thus creating Cyber Monday (often referred to as the busiest online shopping day of the year).

Have you found any good deals online this week? Let us know.

One thing some people might not realize is that you don't have to brave the crowds to find great deals for your Holiday shopping. Did you know that numerous stores are currently offering Black Friday deals online? That's right, you could do most of your shopping from the comfort of your own home. Unlike the traditional Black Friday sales, the online deals tend to be more of a "one deal per day" sort of thing. Black-Friday.net offers the following info about this...

"During the entire month of November, stores such as Amazon.com, Walmart, and even eBay will be offering a "Deal of the Day". These deals are just as good as their Black Friday deals, except they are only good for one day! Be sure to check out the stores below to find out what they are offering today."

The site also lists online deals for 16 total stores (with more being added daily it seems), they are: Amazon.com, eBay, Walmart, onSale, Target, Kohl's, MacMall, Best Buy, HP, Dell, Meijer, Sears, NewEgg.com, Buy.com, Kmart and 6th Ave.

Online Holiday sales might be "old hat" to Amazon, but they're becoming known for the deals they have during the week of Thanksgiving. The site offers the following description of the weeklong sale...

You shouldn’t have to stand in a long line to get a great deal. We’re searching for the best Black Friday deals everywhere--including deals other stores are planning--so we can meet or beat their prices and bring them to you even earlier. These limited-supply offers will go quickly but we’ll add new ones throughout the day, every day this week, so you can skip the long lines and still save a bundle.

One company that is getting in on the Black Friday goodness is Apple, as they've announced a “one-day shopping event” which will surely make it a happy Friday for some shoppers. Apple posted the following teaser to get shoppers stirring…

"Come back to the Apple Online Store this Friday for a special one-day-only shopping event. You’ll find lots of great iPod, iPhone and Mac gift ideas - all with free shipping."

Like we said before, shoppers will go to great lengths to save some money, some more so than others. So, what are some of the best deals that will be taking place on Black Friday 2009 in stores? We’ve scoured through the Black Friday advertisements and have listed the best prices for what surely will be the best selling items.

Televisions
[Target] Westinghouse 32" Class 720p LCD HDTV - $246.00
[Walmart] Emerson 32" LCD 720p HDTV - $248.00
[Best Buy] Dynex 32" 720p 60Hz LCD HDTV - $299.99
[Sears] Vizio 32" Class 720p LCD HDTV - $349.99

Desktop Computers
[Best Buy] eMachines Desktop: 18.5" LCD, 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD - $299.97
[Dell Home] Dell Inspiron 537s: 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD - $349.00
[Walmart] HP Pavilion Desktop: 20" LCD, 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD - $398.00

Laptops / Netbooks
[Walmart] eMachines 15.6" Laptop: 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD - $198.00
[Best Buy] Compaq Netbook: 1GB RAM, 160GB HD - $179.99
[Kmart] Delstar 7" Wireless Netbook - $119.99
[Radio Shack] Acer Aspire One Netbook - 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD - $249.99

MP3 Players - 4GB and under
[Kmart] Sylvania 4GB MP3/Video Player - $19.99
[Kohl's] 2GB MP3 Player with Video - $24.99
[Walmart] Philips 4GB MP3/Video Player - $29.00
[Best Buy] SanDisk: Sansa Fuze 4GB - $44.99

MP3 Players - 4GB and up
[Costco] Apple 8GB iPod Nano - $129.99
[Target] Apple 5th Gen. 8GB iPod Nano 2/ $15 Target Gift Card - $145.00
[Walmart] Apple 8GB iPod Touch w/ $50 iTunes Gift Card - $195.00

Digital Cameras
[Toys R Us] Vivitar 8.1MP Digital Camera - $39.99
[Best Buy] Insignia Digital Camera - $49.99
[Walmart] Kodak CD82: 12MP, 3x Optical Zoom, 3" LCD - $69.00
[Sears] GE A1250 12MP Black Digital Camera - $69.99

Will you be doing any shopping on Black Friday? Online or In Store? Tell us

Other Black Friday Resources:

Black Friday Websites
Two of the more popular Black Friday sites are BFAds.net and BlackFriday.info. Both are relatively the same, as they both feature scans, lists by store, and the ability to save to a shopping/wish list.

Black Friday & Facebook
Black-Friday.net runs a Facebook page, which lists the various Black Friday deals. The great thing about the Facebook page is that users can see the likes and comments, which could aid in the Black Friday planning for Facebook users.

Black Friday & Twitter
CheapTweet.com, a site that lists various deals, runs a very popular Twitter account, which tweets out Black Friday deals.

iPhone Apps
Black Friday? Yeah, there’s an app for that. With TGI Black Friday (iTunes link) you’re never without the latest Black Friday deal news. The best part about the app... it’s Free.

What are you going after this year on Black Friday? Have any good Black Friday stories? Tell us.

Google Getting More Experimental With Search Ads

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:42:39 -0500

Google is now offering some new formats for search ads. They have already been testing them in the U.S., so there is a chance you have already seen some of them if you live here.

Some of them include videos. Some include maps. Some include multiple links for different landing pages. Some of the new ads include product images with corresponding links and prices. Some actually offer comparison shopping functionality.

Take a look at some examples:

"At Google, we're committed to giving you the information you want — regardless of the form in which it might appear," says Google VP, Product Management Susan Wojcicki. "Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we've blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com."

Using that logic, Google figured its search ads should fit a similar mold. The company says that while it is experimenting with new formats, they will "remain loyal" to their core principal, which is, "getting the right ad to the right person at the right time."

Google says you will probably see even more formats appear with search results in the future. This will occur until they figure out which ones are most useful, relevant, and engaging. Expect a lot of new things.

Related Articles:

> Google and Heineken Study Paid Search for Branding

> Report: Paid Search Spend Up 10%

> Search Ads Convert Better with Display

Sync Your Computer's Firefox with Your Phone's

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:15:38 -0500

Update 3: Mozilla has now released Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 2.

Update 2: Mozilla has now announced the release of Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 1.

Update: Mozilla has now released Weave Version 0.6.

Original Article: A couple years ago, Mozilla launched Weave, which is a Mozilla Labs project aimed at letting Firefox users sync their personal preferences with Firefox browsers on other computers or on their phones. Now, Mozilla has announced a new version of Weave Sync in Weave 0.5.

What Can You Do with It?

- Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers.

- Open any tab that is open in any of your other FF browsers

- Keep the same list of bookmarks throughout multiple FF browsers

- Easily sign in to all of your favorites sites using saved passwords

- It is all secure as Weave Sync encrypts user data before uploading it to Mozilla's servers

The new version includes additional improvements including a major upgrade in performance when uploading and downloading. Sync waits until you're not actively using the browser, and support for bookmark tags and smart folders has been improved.

Support has also been added for changing passwords, and there is better error handling and reporting. Weave Sync now supports Fennec on Windows Mobile and Firefox on x86 OpenSolaris now as well.

More information is available about Weave here, and it can be downloaded here. It requires Firefox 3.5 or higher.

Gmail Lets You Send Attachments While Offline

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:04:50 -0500

Google has introduced a feature that lets you send attachments in Gmail while you're offline. It works the same way as it would online, except that you can't include inline images.

"If you have Offline Gmail enabled, you'll notice that all your mail now goes through the outbox, regardless of whether you're online or offline," says Google software engineer Andy Palay. "This allows Gmail to capture all attachments, even if you suddenly get disconnected from network. If you're online, your mail will quickly be sent along to its destination."

To get Offline Gmail, you have to go to the Labs tab in Gmail. Then select "enable" next to the offline Gmail option, and save you changes:

Once you reload the browser, there will be an "Offline" link in the upper right-hand corner of your Gmail page, by your username. The link will take you to Offline Gmail's set-up. You will have to download Google Gears if you don't already have it installed on you machine.

On a related note, Google is calling upon Gmail users to send them photos of themselves using Gmail offline in "unusual places." They are planning a blog post showcasing the most interesting ones. This could be part of a bigger plan to show people different cases where using Gmail offline can be handy, considering Google's big push for Google Apps of late.

Related Articles:

> Gmail Aims to Save Embarrassment Yet Again

> Gmail Gets a New Label Feature

> Google Adds Google Docs Previews to Gmail

Online Shoppers Have Bigger Holiday Budgets Than Offline Shoppers

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:37:37 -0500

Compete has shared some findings from a new study on consumer holiday shopping behavior. According to the firm, active online buyers (consumers who intend to spend over 30% of their holiday budgets online) have bigger budgets than other shoppers. Furthermore, they are more likely to spend that money on Black Friday.

The study shows that "active online buyers" plan to spend twice as much ($912 on average) throughout the holiday season as other consumers. 37 percent of the online buyers also say they'll shop on Black Friday, compared with 33 percent of other consumers.

"Many retailers are bracing for lower online sales, but our research shows that not all shoppers are created equal," said Debra Miller, associate, Retail and Consumers Products at Compete. "While most consumers say they'll spend less this year, online shoppers seem to have deeper pockets and they'll be looking for deals starting on Black Friday. Smart retailers should take a much closer look at online shopping segments relevant to them to capture a larger share of wallet among online consumers."

Other findings from Compete include:

- 86 percent of shoppers have completed less than half of their total holiday shopping; 41 percent have not yet begun.

- 90 percent of consumers will spend at least some portion of their holiday budget online this year, up from 84 percent in 2008.

- 42 percent of consumers reported that they are likely or extremely likely to select an “in store pick up” option if available for holiday purchases.

- 44 percent of consumers plan to spend less this holiday season compared to last year, while only 12 percent of shoppers anticipate spending more.

The report was compiled from a survey of over 2,900 consumers this month. What are your holiday spending plans? Are you an "active online buyer?"

Related Articles:

> Holiday Shoppers Want Deals Even More Than They Did Last Year

> More People Plan To Shop Online During The Holidays

> Good Chunk of Holiday Spending Will Be Online

Twitter Cofounder Talks Again About Acquisitions

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:12:03 -0500

There's no need to start refreshing the Twitter Blog every five seconds; it doesn't sound like any pens are poised over paper at the moment. However, Biz Stone has made some statements concerning acquisitions that point to more of them taking place in the future.

"That is something we are definitely interested in," Stone said at a press conference in Israel, according to Steven Scheer. He then referenced Summize, continuing, "We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision."

And Stone also added, "As our attention is grabbed by some of these developers, we will take a hard look at them."

Now (and/or in the next few months) might be a good time for Twitter to make acquisitions, considering that its bank accounts are fairly full and the economy remains on shaky ground. Critics might grumble if Twitter spends money without first starting to make it - as always, monetization remains a concern - but there are other things, like iffy growth and uptime figures, to consider.

We'll keep an eye on the situation, then. Just don't place a bet on anything occurring during what's normally a rather slow news season.

Related Articles:

> What's Not To Like About Twitter's New Retweet Feature

> Twitter Expands Into More Than Just 2 Languages

> Twitter Makes Geotagging Tweets Possible

Google Ignoring Its Own Policy on Desktop AdSense?

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:21:52 -0500

It has been discovered that Google is now showing AdSense ads inside Google Earth. While it is not that surprising to see Google putting ads on another one of its properties, it has raised a few eyebrows, given that Google Earth is a desktop application.

Google actually states in its policy that it doesn't allow developers to use AdSense ads in their desktop apps, but it appears that Google is bending the rules for its own product. The company is certainly free to do so, given that it owns the product, but some are beginning to wonder if this could lead to Google changing that policy.

Currently that section of Google's policy reads:

"Currently, we don't permit Google ads or AdSense for search boxes to be distributed through software applications including, but not limited to toolbars, browser extensions, and desktop applications. In order to comply with AdSense program policies, please note that Google AdSense code may only be implemented on web-based pages."

Blogger Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration appears to be the first to point out the ads in Google Earth, and he provides a couple of screenshots here. In one, you can see AdSense ads when you search for a location or business, and the ads can be found in the search results. In the other screenshot, you can see the ad in the window that pops up when you click a placemark (the red pins on the maps).

The interesting part of this find is not so much that Google is placing ads in Google Earth, but what it could mean if the company were to in fact change its policy.

"If that policy changes, we could see more and more of Office 2010 Starter or FeedDemon like applications that are completely free to the end-user but supported by web advertising," says Agarwal.

Joseph Tartakoff at PaidContent adds that "arch rival" Microsoft has already promised to introduce the ad-supported version of Office to come pre-loaded on PCs.

It is possible that there is being too much read into Google's decision to include AdSense ads in Google Earth. It does make for an interesting conversation though. What do you think?

Related Articles:

> Google Familiarizes AdWords Users with New Interface

> Blogger Gets AdSense For Feeds Integration

> Google Friend Connect Gets an AdSense Feature

Is the Murdoch Bing Deal Really Just About the Wall Street Journal?

Rich Ord — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:10:00 -0500

After all is said and done Rupert Murdoch may still be seen as the sly old fox that really knew best. Many bloggers and journalists have pounded the insanity of Murdoch's suggestion that News Corp publications might strike an exclusive indexing deal with Bing and delist itself from Google's search engine.

However, what if Murdoch was really only talking about the Wall Street Journal and not all News Corp publications? Then the idea might actually make a lot of sense.

According to Compete.com WSJ.com already receives the largest percentage of its traffic from Microsoft' (18.74%). This is contrary to many sites which typically receive the majority of their referrals from Google, often many times more than what Microsoft delivers. Yahoo provides another 6.3% and since Bing will likely be owning Yahoo's search business that means Microsoft is actually delivering 25% of the Wall Street Journals current traffic.

If Rupert Murdoch can get Microsoft to pay possibly as much as $50 million or more a year to lose just 11.5% of his Google traffic sent to WSJ.com the deal makes a lot of sense.

According to Hitwise Google and Google News combined deliver approximately 26% of WSJ.com visitors. However, even with this larger percentage (vs. Compete's) Hitwise notes in a blog post why this might not be as much of a traffic loss as it appears:

Analyzing Google search terms driving traffic to the Journal, the top 100 terms accounted for over 21.6% of all Google search traffic to WSJ.com. Of that 21.6%, 13.4% were navigational or brand searches (e.g. "Wall Street Journal," "WSJ," "WSJ.com" etc...). Even if Murdoch decides to block Google, these navigational search queries will most likely remain intact.

Of the remaining 8.2%, the majority of searches were for stock quotes, and general business related searches. Most specific news related searches fill-out the long tail of search queries. While the Journal may lose traffic if it ceases to cooperate with Google the loss may be less then anticipated.

From Bing's perspective Wall Street Journal exclusivity not only differentiates Bing from Google but it could also help change its image as a more consumer focused search engine. The Wall Street Journal is the most read business publication in the World and this deal could go a long way toward modifying Bing's consumer image in the minds of business executives.

After all, a click resulting from a B2B oriented search term usually demands a premium price, which could help offset Bing's cost of paying Murdoch for exclusive inclusion.

Google Obtains Access To TiVo Data

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:47:33 -0500

Google TV Ads is about to become a significantly more powerful marketing system. A new pact with TiVo will allow Google to gather (and then pass on) very precise data about which commercials are being viewed, and even (to a lesser degree) who is doing the watching.

Mike Steib, Google's director of emerging platforms, explained the arrangement in a formal statement. "This deal with TiVo will give advertisers access to even more anonymized viewership data, making Google's dataset one of the best in the industry," Steib said. "Advertisers can use this data to understand which audiences and ads are most effective, which we think will ultimately lead to more relevant ads for viewers."

This development is likely to result in heavier use of Google TV Ads, too. After all, the more data Google can provide, the less risky its program will seem, perhaps causing marketers to embrace it over alternatives or give TV ads a shot for the very first time.

What's a little harder to discern is how TiVo benefits from the arrangement. Presumably Google paid more than a couple of dollars for access to TiVo users' data; all Todd Juenger, TiVo's vice president and general manager of audience research and measurement, would say is that this acts "to help the media industry better understand the effectiveness of ad campaigns in an evolving TV landscape."

Anyway, Google TV Ads is supposed to be able to reach 96 million households as things stand, and has served over 100 billion ad impressions to date.

Related Articles:

> Google Gets A New Real-Time Infrastructure For Display Ads

> Google To Get More Interactive With Mobile Video Ads

> Google Ad Planner Gets Several New Enhancements

Interesting Chrome Extensions On the Way

Chris Crum — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:18:17 -0500

Google has opened up the Chrome Extension Gallery (beta) to developers. This means that anyone can now upload their extensions. Google says it is making the upload flow available early so developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of Google's full launch.

"Once an extension is uploaded, our gallery takes care of packaging and signing," says Google software engineer Lei Zheng. "Updating an extension is also incredibly easy — all a developer needs to do is to upload a new file in the gallery. Finally, to further help developers, in the next few days, we plan to open up the gallery to a small group of trusted testers. They will provide developers with insights and bug reports that will help them polish their extensions ahead of our beta launch."

Google provides the following tips for uploading extensions:

- Upload a ZIP file of your extension directory, not a packaged CRX file.

- Include a well-designed product icon in your manifest (more info).

- After uploading your extension, you will need to provide a detailed description, as well as screenshots or a YouTube video of your extension in action.

The review process is fully automated in most cases. Google will manually review ones that include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect "file://" URLs. Developers will have to give Google additional information for these types of extensions, for security reasons.

Information about how to write extensions for Chrome can be found here. Google says all types of extensions are welcome, as long as they comply with their terms of service.

Related Articles:

> Link Signaling Google Chrome Extensions Surfaces

> Google Chrome For Mac May Hit Beta In December

> New Google Chrome Release Includes Bookmark Sync

Report: Microsoft, News Corp. Plotting Against Google

Doug Caverly — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:47:03 -0500

The companies behind search engines sometimes try to attract more traffic by advertising. Establishing a partnership is another strategy, as is improving the actual search results. Microsoft might be ready to try something a little different, however, as a new report's indicated that the company is interested in making Google's results worse.

Remember the days when arguments about search engines centered on the size of their indices? Well, according to Matthew Garrahan and Richard Waters, Microsoft does. "Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company's being paid to 'de-index' its news websites from Google," the pair reported.

They then continued, "Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google's search engine."

This idea seems plausible enough, given that Microsoft has a history of paying for users (think of its popular and long-running cashback program). There's also the simple fact that Microsoft, with its market cap of $263 billion, could possibly outspend Google (which has a market cap of $181 billion) if a bidding war erupted.

What's more difficult to say is whether the idea is any good. There's no word on how much money News Corp. and other publishers would receive, and it's anybody's guess how many searchers would switch engines to retain easy access to their content.

Related Articles:

> 80% Of Consumers Would Not Pay For Content

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

Ensuring Your Site is Indexed in Google's Mobile Search

Chris Crum — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:19:29 -0500

In this day and age, you pretty much can't ignore mobile users. The rate at which consumers are accessing the web via mobile devices is growing rapidly, largely thanks to the increasing popularity and production of smartphones.

Just having a mobile site isn't even enough. Sure, it's a great start, but you have to start thinking about a mobile site just as you would a regular site. Can people find it? Just because you have a good ranking in Google does not mean that your mobile site has a good ranking in Google's mobile search engine, or is even indexed at all.

Google recently shared a few important tips for making sure your mobile site is being indexed in Google's Mobile Search.

1. Create a mobile sitemap and submit it to Google so Google knows it exists. This can be done using Google Webmaster Tools, just like with a regular sitemap.

2. To make sure Googlebot-Mobile can access your site, allow any User-agent to access it.

"You should also be aware that Google may change its User-agent information at any time without notice, so it is not recommended that you check if the User-agent exactly matches 'Googlebot-Mobile' (which is the string used at present)," says Jun Mukai, a software engineer on Google's mobile search team. "Instead, check whether the User-agent header contains the string 'Googlebot-Mobile'. You can also use DNS Lookups to verify Googlebot."

3. Check that your mobile-friendly URLs' DTD (Doc Type Definition) declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML.

If you run both a regular site and a mobile version of it, there is a possibility that the wrong version will show up in the wrong search results. There are ways you can prevent this.

"When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page," explains Mukai. "Google notices the relationship between the two versions of the URL and displays the standard version for searches from desktops and the mobile version for mobile searches."

If you do use a redirect, you should make sure content on the corresponding URL matches as closely as possible, because Google finds sites that abuse the practice in order to try and boost their rankings. Google says this should be avoided at all costs, so you can probably expect to be penalized for such an action.

Another way you can make sure a user is pointed to the right version of your site is simply to provide a link. In fact, that is what Google itself does. If you access the mobile version of Google, you will find a link to the desktop version.

Another way still, is to switch content based on the User-agent, so mobile users automatically see the mobile version and desktop users see the desktop version, even though both are accessing the same URL.

Google warns, however, that if you use this method, there is a chance that if you fail to configure your site correctly, it could be mistaken for cloaking, which you can be penalized for.

"To remain within our guidelines, you should serve the same content to Googlebot as a typical desktop user would see, and the same content to Googlebot-Mobile as you would to the browser on a typical mobile device," says Mukai. "It's fine if the contents for Googlebot are different from the one for Googlebot-Mobile."

Have you taken the necessary steps to ensure you are being indexed in Google's mobile search engine? Have you been left out due to cloaking-related confusion? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Custom Search For Smartphones

> Google Gives Mobile Searchers More Options

> Google Revamps Mobile Local Search Experience

Now Google Delivers GPS for Android 1.6

Chris Crum — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:26:42 -0500

Update: Google has now announced that it is expanding availability of Google Maps Navigation to devices running Android 1.6 (Donut) and higher, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the G1.

Original Article: Google has launched Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 devices in beta. This acts as a GPS navigation system with 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance, and automatic rerouting.

"But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone's Internet connection," says Google Software Engineer Keith Ito.

Because of that Internet connection, Google provides seven features that are available:

1. The most recent map and business data
2. Ability to search in plain English
3. Ability to search by voice
4. Traffic View
5. Ability to search along a route
6. Satellite View
7. Street View

The following video demonstrates how Google Maps Navigation functions:

GPS users may find the "search along route" feature to be particularly helpful. It is designed to let you search along your route to give you results that will keep you near your path. You can search for specific businesses by name or type and turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants or parking. Since Google will provide the most recent map and business data, this is likely to be a more efficient tool than similar options from other GPS systems.

Verizon's Droid is the first phone to have the Google Maps Navigation and Android 2.0. Google Maps Navigation is only available in the U.S. currently. More information on the feature can be found here.

Related Articles

> Google Makes Biggest Design Changes to Maps Yet

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Now LinkedIn Will Be Featured in a Lot More Apps

Chris Crum — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:42:48 -0500

LinkedIn has opened up its platform to developers. It can be accessed at developer.linkedin.com.

"Over fifty million users entrust their professional identities and relationships with LinkedIn, helping build LinkedIn into the largest global professional network today," says LinkedIn' Adam Nash. "However, professionals around the world use a wide variety of applications and Web sites to get their work done, and they have spoken loud and clear that they want the ability to leverage their professional networks wherever they work."

Now developers can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications. LinkedIn's developer site has APIs and widgets.

"Over the past months, LinkedIn has supported integrations with some of the most prominent and critical software applications in the enterprise," says Nash. "Partnerships with companies like IBM, Blackberry (Research in Motion), and most recently Microsoft, have given us time to invest in both functionality and scalability of the platform."

Developers interested in using LinkedIn in their apps need only fill out a form at the site. The LinkedIn platform leverages the open OAuth standard, so integrations should be that much more simple.

On a related note, Twitter client TweetDeck is already utilzing the LinkedIn platform. They just announced that you can view or take action on your LinkedIn network updates from within the TweetDeck application.

It should be interesting to see the kinds of apps that start taking advantage of LinkedIn's APIs. This could turn out to be a very significant event for increasing business networking, and even matching prospective job candidates with jobs.

Related Articles:

> LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties

> LinkedIn Tests a New Design

> LinkedIn, Twitter Connect Through Status Updates

Android Continues To Make Inroads

Doug Caverly — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:06:33 -0500

Google's Android is growing like a weed. Perhaps even a weed that's been fertilized and watered as if it was a desirable flower. A new report from AdMob lays out some impressive usage statistics and hints that there's much more to come.

Here are two eye-opening stats of a somewhat broad-spectrum nature: "Worldwide requests from Android devices increased 5.8 times since April 2009." Also, "In the US, Android has 20% share of smartphone traffic, up from 7% six months before . . ."

That's quite interesting, considering what a stranglehold iPhone, Symbian, and RIM seemed to have on the market before Android launched.

Then here's the really remarkable part: the AdMob report stated, "[T]he Motorola Droid launched on November 6 with a big marketing push from Verizon and two weeks after launch it already represented 24% of all Android requests in AdMob's network worldwide." (Note: the graph visible above uses data from before the Droid's release.)

If the Droid can continue to attract users at that sort of pace - and/or if future Android phones generate so much excitement - Android's market share is likely to become much larger very soon.

Related Articles:

> Dell To Launch Android-Based Smartphone

> Apple Fans Respond To "The Droid Does" Advertising Campaign

> Google Delivers GPS For Android 2.0 Devices

Google Gets a New Real-Time Infrastructure for Display Ads

Chris Crum — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:45:58 -0500

Google just announced that it is acquiring Teracent, a provider of "intelligent dynamic display advertising." The company considers itself a pioneer in dynamic ad serving and optimization solutions. Google appears to agree.

Teracent provides machine-learning algorithms, which can create customized display ads based on thousands of different creative elements. The infrastructure Teracent brings to the table allows for real-time assembly of dynamic ads. It's designed to determine the optimal selection of each ad element and return it based on the objectives of the campaign.

"As you know, we've been busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the web for everyone," Google says. "We believe that Teracent's technology fits neatly into these efforts."

Google says the one on the right was created with Teracent's technology.

"Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors," the company adds. "These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads."

"The infrastructure, opportunities and technical depth that Google will provide for Teracent customers means a future of product innovation for Teracent's dynamic ad optimization platform," Teracent says in their own announcement.

Google says the technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns, while enabling publishers to make more money from their ad space.

Teracent's technology will be available to all Google advertisers running display ads, including DoubleClick clients. The deal is expected to close this quarter, subject to various, but unnamed closing conditions.

Integration details will be announced after the deal is officially closed. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Related Articles:

> Does Size Matter in Display Advertising?

> Google Launches New Display Ad Measurement Tool

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AdTweets Seek to Promote Retweeting of Ads

Chris Crum — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:10:06 -0500

Businesses and ad networks are increasingly finding new ways to integrate social media and advertising. This is evident with AdKnowledge's recent acquisition of SocialMedia.com's ad network, and it is also evident with TweetMeme's new AdTweets. AdTweets is a product, which TweetMeme says is designed to reward advertisers for using engaging advertisements.

"The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts, and give the audience a chance to decide, and essentially vote, on what they like," says TweetMeme's Nick Halstead. "Produce a good advert that your audience likes, and you can easily tap into the viral nature of Twitter and the ‘retweet effect’, which will then dramatically increase your reach."

The TweetMeme retweet button can be integrated into any standard IAB ad size, as the company points out. Still, advertisers can choose between a compact button or the standard button. AdTweets can also utilize TweetMeme's analytics to monitor the success of a campaign.

TweetMeme has also re-launched "Featured Tweets," which help promote specific stories and encourage the sharing of content to other Twitter users.

"The potential value of the featured tweets was apparent in the first version, but there were some essential elements missing," says Halstead. "After taking on board invaluable feedback from both users and customers, the service was suspended. It was back to the drawing board, and what has emerged is a new Featured Tweet system that sponsors can use to bring relevant news and stories quickly to the attention of the TweetMeme Community, who then have the opportunity to retweet the story to their Twitter Followers and so on."

According to TweetMeme, the purpose of Featured Tweets is to give stories that have a good chance of going viral, a "helping hand." They are supposedly better targeted now, include analytics, and there are a reduced number of sponsored stories per page.

Related Articles:

> What's Been Going on with TweetMeme?

> More to Retweeting Than Meets the Eye for Businesses?

> TweetMeme Bringing Analytics to the Retweet Table

eBay Back On Its Feet After Search/Browse Outage

Doug Caverly — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:02:51 -0500

eBay suffered a significant malfunction this weekend as an unspecified "technical issue" affected users' ability to both search and browse listings for most of Saturday. Now, the site's been restored to working order, but a lot of sellers remain extremely unhappy.

Lorrie Norrington, the president of eBay Marketplaces, tried to do a bit of damage control by stating, "We know this is a really busy time for sellers ramping up for the holiday season. We're sorry that this technical issue occurred . . . and we regret any potential impact to your business. Our teams worked around the clock to restore functionality as quickly as possible."

Norrington also hinted at the possibility of a financial peace offering, adding, "We will now be assessing the economic impact of this issue and will be compensating sellers appropriately. In the meantime, we will be issuing full fee credits automatically for affected listings."

Still, in the absence of significant compensation, many sellers aren't in a good mood at the moment. A post on eBay Ink, an official corporate blog, has attracted 30 comments so far, and it's possible to find longer (and less politely worded) threads elsewhere. Given that many sellers were already unhappy with fees and policies, eBay may lose a significant amount of business due to the outage.

Traffic to eBay is up on a year-over-year basis, however (at least according to Compete), and the company's stock has risen an impressive 2.61 percent so far this morning.

Related Articles:

> eBay Completes Skype Sale

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> Some eBay Sellers Disgruntled Over Top Rated Sellers Program

New AOL (or is it Aol.?) Logo Revealed

Chris Crum — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:13:35 -0500

AOL has shown off a new logo, which it considers a significant part of its new "brand identity." That is of course to go with its newfound independence from Time Warner. The logo is simple. Aol. That's it - capital A, lower-case o, lower case l, and a period.

"Our new identity is uniquely dynamic. Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people - employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand as we take the company into the next decade," said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and CEO of AOL.

Curiously, in the press release, AOL still uses the all caps method of spelling its name. That doesn't seem like the best way to kick off this new brand identity. To be fair, the company says that identity will be fully unveiled on December 10th, so I guess such trivialities will have to wait until then. That's when AOL's common stock begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Here are a few instances of the new logo, placed on various images:

"Historically brand identity has been monolithic and CONTROLLING, little more than stamping a company name on a product. AOL is a 21st century media company, with an ambitious vision for the future and new focus on creativity and expression, this required the new brand identity to be open and generous, to invite conversation and collaboration, and to feel credible, but also aspirational. We’re delighted to have worked so closely with the AOL leadership team to create something bold and exciting that sets AOL apart," said Karl Heiselman, CEO of Wolff Olins.

Wolff Olins is the consultancy firm that AOL partnered with to develop the new brand identity. According to AOL, some of the "world's best creative artists" created the art and animations for the new brand look.

What do you think of the new AOL logo? Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

> AOL and Time Warner Officially Splitting Up

> AOL Names Post-Time Warner Board of Directors

> AOL Taps Arthur Minson As CFO

Google Doesn't Know if Your Site is in the Cloud

Chris Crum — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:23:26 -0500

Google's Matt Cutts discussed how the search engine handles sites that that are "in the cloud" with regards to how listings are affected. Matt's explanation was a response to the following user-submitted question:

Can moving my website to "the cloud" harm my listings? Say my server's in Germany and I move the website to Google's App Engine or Amazon S3. Does this harm my listings for German results - or is it enough to set the "geographic target" in GWT to Germany?

Matt broke the question down into separate parts to answer them. First, he took on the part about moving a site to "the cloud" harming the users' listings. His answer for this is basically that Google doesn't even know if your site is in the cloud, so it can't use that information to affect listings.

"We don't know what is happening on the side of your web server. Your web server could be running Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby on Rails," said Cutts. "All we know is what the web server returns. So your web server could be running code that would go talk to Amazon's cloud or Appspot or anywhere else in the cloud, but we wouldn't even know that. We don't even know whether a page is dynamically created or statically created. All we know is what the web server sends back."

He says if your site is talking to the cloud behind the scenes, there is now way for any search engine or bot to know about that. Watch the video above to hear Matt's explanation for the second part of the user's question.

Related Articles:

> Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

> Google May Change Your Page Titles

> Where Google Stands on the "Keywords" Meta Tag

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Takes Over Social Media

Jeremy Muncy — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:01:51 -0500

Shhh, can you hear that? What you're hearing is the collective shrieks from Twihards everywhere as The Twilight Saga: New Moon is upon us. For those of you asking yourself, what is a Twihard? I’ve included the definition below.

twi-hard noun
A serious/obsessive reader of the Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer, one leap above Twilighters.

Are you a Twilight fan? Do you plan on seeing the movie? Let us know.

Currently the Twilight Saga is all the rage, and seems to have taken over almost every aspect of social media. If you venture over to MySpace.com you’ll see that the homepage has been New Moonified. It should be noted that New Moon & MySpace seem to share the same demographic, Tweens... so it only makes sense to try and grab those pageviews.

MySpace has been all about some New Moon here lately, as they just hosted an exclusive stream of the red carpet during the films premiere, which pulled in 3 million viewers. Did you watch any of the red carpet stream? Tell us.

Over on Twitter, Twilight holds 3 of the top 10 trending topics including the highly coveted top spot.

If you search for "New Moon" on Twitter it seems like you need to constantly refresh so you can see the hundreds of new Tweets. Below is an interesting graph, which shows the buzz over New Moon, comparing blogs to Twitter. You can obviously see the drastic climb just from last month, as the hype around the movie grew with each day.

YouTube is even trying to cash-in on the New Moon craze by adding a “Twihard” box atop their site that states the following, "The world is gripped by Twilight mania these days and on YouTube that translates into videos that celebrate, discuss and even mock the cultural phenomenon."

Like I said before, New Moon hits theatres today and is expected to make somewhere between 85 million – 100 million dollars this weekend, and could possibly break some box office records when it’s all said and done. It’s already broken the advance ticket sales record, previously held by Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. How much do you think New Moon will make when it's all said and done? Tell us.

It'll be interesting to compare New Moon's "social media status" against the next film in the saga when it hits the cinema around this same time next year, to see if it stil has the same amount of hype around it.

Why do you think Twilight is such a huge success? Tell us know your honest opinion.

If You Care About Search, You Must Care About Social Media

Chris Crum — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:48:11 -0500

All of the search engines are rushing to incorporate more social media elements into their interfaces. Examples of this are evident in things like Google and Bing's deals with Twitter and Facebook. You can see it in Yahoo's new Twitter tab for news results. You can see it in Google's Social Search lab. Really you can see it in everyday search results.

Do you consider a social presence an important element to your search campaign? Discuss here.

A lot of Internet users spend a great deal of their time socializing or using social media sites in one way or another, whether that is to connect with others or simply to obtain information. Information is a key component of social media that often takes a backseat to communication in discussion of social media tools.

The fact of the matter is that more and more people are getting more and more of their information from social sites. That could be in the form of following a news publication on Twitter, following company updates on a blog or a Facebook page, or something as simple as a friend sharing a link.

Given that people are getting more info from social media sites, of course search engines want a piece of that, because their whole reason for existence is naturally to help users find what they are looking for on the web.

So, it stands to reason that if you want people to find information that you are producing, it can help a great deal to publish information and participate in conversations on social media sites. Never mind that users of those particular sites will have access to it. The general public will as well by way of search, regardless of whether or not they are a part of any particular community.

In an interview with WebProNews, Vanessa Fox, who used to work for Google, talked about reasons that businesses should be thinking about social media with regards to search. It's about visibility. If you are having discussions out there about relevant topics, they could appear in search results not only in real-time search, but further down the road as well.

In other words, if you have a conversation with a peer on Twitter about some topic related to your niche, there is a good chance the resulting tweets of that conversation could appear in search results for that topic on Google, even a year from now, if that tweet happens to be relevant enough. That's just an example (note: it's hard to say at this point, just how tweets will impact search once the Google-Twitter deal starts showing results).

There are a variety of ways in which a social campaign can contribute to your performance in search engines, regardless of what these recent deals might produce. Like Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing recently discussed with WebProNews, you can optimize your social content.

The web went blog crazy a few years back. Marketers found out that blogs were great for achieving search engine visibility because of the content and links that can come from them. It's not that different with social media now. The web has largely moved into a social media-heavy phase, as I'm sure you've noticed. Search engines obviously know this and care about it.

As Fox says in her interview, it's getting to the point where more businesses are starting to realize that they need to be involved with social media. However, surveys still frequently suggest that many are reluctant, and even if they do engage to some extent, they are still holding back, and not reaching the potential they could be.

You know search is important to marketing on the web. Really, it's important to marketing, period. If you operate on the web or off, your customers are on still online, as Fox noted. Social media is growing increasingly important to search. And search is only one aspect of online marketing. There are many more benefits to social media than that.

How important is social media to search? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Facebook/Twitter Use May Now Mean More for Google/Bing Rankings

> Social is Only Going to Become More Important to Search

> Where Social Media Fits Into the SEO Equation

What's Not to Like About Twitter's New Retweet Feature?

Chris Crum — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 05:01:06 -0500

Twitter is of course in the process of rolling out a new retweet feature. The feature adds a retweet button to each tweet on your timeline, much like the "reply" button that has always been there. However, one distinct difference between these two buttons is that where the reply button fills out your form with the proper information ("@username"), the retweet button sends the initial tweet to your followers' timelines without giving you your own tweet.

Do you prefer the old way of retweeting or the new way? Share your thoughts here.

In other words, you don't get to add anything to it, you're just duplicating a tweet that came to you and sending it to your followers. You're forwarding it.

There are things to like about the feature. For one it's more convenient if you just want to pass on an interesting tweet. If you're the one being retweeted, it puts you in the spotlight in other people's streams rather than the person who retweeted you. It kind of feels like you're getting more credit for your tweets, although if you are just tweeting a link to someone else's blog post that might not necessarily come off as a positive. Twitter CEO Evan Williams put up an interesting blog post last week defending the feature before it even had much of a chance to get torn apart by users. He knew it would be controversial, and he even acknowledged that fact.

As happens when any heavily-used site makes changes, some people get upset about it. Lisa Barone at outSpoken Media made a list of "things that suck" about the new retweet feature, and she brings up a number of good points, but her biggest peeve seems to be that of the avatars of people she doesn't know showing up in her stream.

"Showing the unfamiliar avatar does not give me 'more context' for the tweet. It gives me less because I don’t know this individual," she says. "If I were to see Rae’s avatar, I’d know to trust the content. I'd know it already passed the snuff test. When I see someone else’s avatar, I’m thrown off and confused. Will I get used to it? No, I'll simply learn to ignore things from people I don’t know."

She has a valid point in that seeing unfamiliar faces can be a bit off-putting, but aren't the retweets still passing the "snuff test" since they are still being retweeted by people you follow? It's not like these "strangers" are actually coming in and spamming us. It's just a visually different way of presenting them. Whether or not we like that is one thing, but it's a retweet from someone we're following just as it was before in this regard. A great many Twitter users probably don't even recognize half of the people they follow anyway.

That said, there are a number of other issues with the feature, as Barone points out. Some of the ones she touches on are:

- Can't add own commentary (what if you don't agree with what you're retweeting?)

- Plays down user's visibility in own network

- Changes the definition of retweeting (makes it more like a Facebook "like")

The feature is still in limited beta testing, so regardless of what you feel about the feature, there is a possibility it will change. Even still, if you don't like the feature, you don't have to use it. You can still use the classic "RT" method just as you have always done. You just have a new option now. Depending on how many of the people you follow use the new feature, your Twitter experience can be affected more or less by it.

Are you getting the new retweet feature yet? What is your opinion? What do you like about it? What do you dislike about it. Tell WebProNews readers what you think about it.

Related Articles:

> An Equation for Getting More Traffic from Twitter

> Wonder What Percentage of Tweets are Retweets?

> More to Retweeting Than Meets the Eye for Businesses?

Google to Alert Webmasters of New Software Versions

Chris Crum — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:23:13 -0500

Google is going to start letting webmasters know when the software they run on their site is outdated. Through Webmater Tools, Google will begin alerting users of new versions of software when they are released.

"One of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things," says Patrick Chapman of Google's Search Quality Team. "One idea we tried out was to let webmasters know about their potentially hackable websites. The initial effort was successful enough that we thought we would take it one step further by expanding our efforts to cover other types of web applications—for example, more content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers, and so on."

"This time, however, our goal is not just to isolate vulnerable or hackable software packages, but to also notify webmasters about newer versions of the software packages or plugins they're running on their website," he continues. "For example, there might be a Drupal module or Joomla extension update available but some folks might not have upgraded."

One way Google identifies sites that need to be notified is by parsing source code of web pages that it crawls. Content management systems usually include generator meta tags that specify the version number. This helps Google figure out when sites aren't running the latest version.

The company is encouraging developers to use such generator meta tags in their software if they are not already doing so. This, along with Google's efforts, should theoretically keep their users using the most recent versions. That is Google's goal, anyway.

Google says they will begin sending out notifications soon, but doesn't give a more specific time. Do you think this is a good idea?

Related Articles:

> Google Ditches PageRank in Webmaster Tools

> Google Alters Site Verification in Webmaster Tools

> Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

Doug Caverly — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:27:16 -0500

The "virtual fifth label" is now friends with MySpace. Merlin, an organization that represents independent music companies, is supposed to have signed a deal with the social network that should nicely complement MySpace's existing partnerships with EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner.

Merlin's association with indie artists and late arrival to the music scene (it launched in January of 2007) set it apart from the so-called Big Four. Just the same, Merlin's a major force, with members in more than 25 countries, and names like Cat Power, Tom Waits, and The White Stripes linked with it.

So it's quite noteworthy that, according to Andrew Orlowski, a Merlin spokesman stated, "After more than a year of negotiations, MySpace Music has finally offered Merlin a deal that is acceptable to its members, members who represent 10% of the global music market."

What's more, "The same eligibility and level of participation will be offered to all independent labels licensing content to MySpace Music."

Of course, the details of the arrangement haven't yet been made public, which leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But it looks like MySpace, which acquired Imeem just yesterday and launched MySpace Music Charts the day before, is really on a roll on the music front.

Related Articles:

> MySpace Picks Up Imeem

> MySpace Launches New Music Charts

> MySpace's "New Moon" Webcast Brings In 3m Viewers

Americans' Social Media Habits Highlight Business Potential

Chris Crum — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:20:02 -0500

Euro RSCG released some interesting findings from a study exploring the different ways Americans are using social media to "redefine their lives." The study looked at 1,228 social media users in the United States.

"Word of mouth has always been the most powerful marketing tool; what social media has done is dramatically increase the scale, velocity and immediacy with which people can influence each other and create the biggest revolution to hit our industry since television," said David Jones, global CEO of Euro RSCG. "One of the interesting findings of the study is that it's the combination of online and offline experiences that creates the biggest impact."

Other findings include:

- Even though 53.5% of respondents have met new people through electronic media, face-to-face interaction is still the "gold standard"

- Consumers are engaging more in multi-way exchanges of ideas and opinions among consumers and brands

- Consumers are not only move involved with family and friends, but they have increased involvement in political and humanitarian issues.

- 40% agree that social groupings online can be truly social, while only 14% disagree. According to Euro RSCG, figures varied little across age, gender, ethnic, or income groups.

"Online social networking has become part of our culture so quickly, it's easy to forget just how new it is and how much it's a work in progress. People are still experimenting with the different options and finding ways to make it part of their life," said Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, North America. "Forget the images of sad antisocial types. Smart consumers are mixing and matching the tools that come available to meet their social needs. Electronic tools are making them even more socially active, just as the telephone did back in the day."

Perhaps more interesting than the statistics provided by the firm, are the key takeaways it cites. This includes things like the fact that social media is an important consideration for any communications strategy, and the fact that it's impossible to predict how bits of communication will spread across social media.

The firm also says that even though the web is world-wide, its emerging power is hyperlocal. This is because this is the space where online and offline most often meet. That is a key reason why businesses, particularly local businesses should not ignore social media.

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Facebook Sends Cease And Desist To Friend-Seller

Doug Caverly — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:17:28 -0500

uSocial is a controversial advertising company that specializes in social media. For a fee, it promises to get stories on the front page of Digg, direct followers to a Twitter account, and/or find someone Facebook fans (among other things). But Facebook's put at least a temporary stop to the sale of friends.

The BBC reported this afternoon, "Facebook sent Cease and Desist letters to USocial claiming that the way the marketing firm operates violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm."

As a result, "USocial defended itself against Facebook's claims, saying that it did not spam users or use web tools to gather information about profiles. . . . However, in response to the legal letters, USocial said it would delete the login information it had collected and broadly stop offering to sell Facebook friends."

This is an interesting development insofar as, three months ago, Twitter also tried to crack down on uSocial. Its back-channel methods apparently didn't succeed, but now that Facebook's established a precedent, we might see another attempt. Delicious, Digg, and Reddit could well join the fight, too.

Of course, the hubbub around such a scuffle would act as free advertising for uSocial and might spread the notion that these social media sites can be gamed, so it's also possible that absolutely nothing will occur.

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Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

Chris Crum — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:48:57 -0500

Microsoft has launched a new site for Bing, where users can go to find out the latest features that have been implemented into the search engine (excuse me, "decision engine"). The site's called Behind Bing.

"You can see each feature in action though a screencast, see me talk about why we did it the way we did (for those who like to geek out), and get some drill-down details," says Bing's Stefan Weitz. "For those of you pressed for time, check out 'Features for You' at the bottom of the site which highlights some features that I thought were especially cool depending on what and where you are."

Highlighted on the site currently are sections looking at:

- Real-time search
- Bing Local
- Weather/Event results
- Enhanced Results
- Enhanced hover
- Bing for mobile
- Videos
- Bing Travel
- Bing Health
- Visual Search
- Bing Shopping
- Wolfram Alpha
- Search Sharing
- Reference

There are videos and other sections for "explore," "overview," and "insight guide." If you don't regularly keep up with Bing's announcements or search news in general, this should serve as a good place to check out from time to time just to see what the search engine has been up to, and to stay informed about any functionalities that you may have otherwise missed. That will of course require that Microsoft keeps it updated.

On a related note, all of the features that Bing announced last week are supposed to be "100%" live now for all users, but that doesn't seem to be accurate, as I am not able to access some of the new stuff yet.

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Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

Chris Crum — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:54:57 -0500

Update: According to Bing, all of the features that were announced are now live. However, they do not appear to be live yet for me. I am guessing they will be soon at least.

Original Article: Microsoft has announced the addition of a number of new features to its Bing search engine. The company says it has been examining the trends in search and in feedback, and is working to accommodate these. Microsoft is referring to trends like the demand for faster access to knowledge, offering different user interfaces for different kinds of results, and an increased focus on "getting things done" with search.

Would you use Bing more if it added the right features? Tell us what it's missing.

Bing is rolling out a new "task-focused" version of its home page. It looks relatively the same as before, but when you mouse over different categories, you will get more search options. For example, if you mouse over "Travel," you will get links like "find flights" and "find hotels," and you can conduct your search from there.

"There is also an interactive Instant Answer that allows you to enter your origin, destination, travel dates and…click…you are in Bing travel," says Bing Product Manager Henry Hall. "Within Bing travel you have fast access to flight purchase recommendations via the price predictor that tells you the least expensive times to fly. In addition to money, you’ll save time as well with Bing travel’s comprehensive flight listing results and links to top travel sites and airlines."

Bing is also enhancing local information for hundreds of cities looking for things like local attractions, points of interest, neighborhoods and other local information sources like newspaper web sites. Bing has developed enhanced city results, which include links to key information and high-resolution slide shows.

Bing is making it easier to find the preview feature. "We're doing a better job mining things like contact phone numbers and email addresses from web pages and displaying them clearly under a Contact banner, and generally cleaning up the interface to make it easier to decide if this a site you want to visit," says Hall. "Last, we're also integrating images in some preview results. We believe that all these features will allow for a faster decision about whether a site is right for your needs, which means less clicking on your browser’s back button."

Bing has also added a new Event Search feature, which gives users a summary of events for major cities, which can be filtered by things like performances, food & dining, fairs & festivals, music, etc.

Bing has also made it easy to share results for shopping searches on Facebook, a feature Hall deems ideal for passing on holiday gift ideas. There are also better results for health-related searches, including, conditions, medications, and hospitals. Each type of query will return more info and a more organized set of results.

Perhaps the biggest addition to Bing is that of Wolfram Alpha's algorithms and "expertly curated data". Wolfram Alpha will help power Bing's results for nutritional information and math searches.

When users search Bing for specific food items, they will get a nutrition quick tab that shows more information about it and a nutrition facts label at the bottom of the results page.

"Another helpful tool is the body mass index that tracks your workout progress," the Bing Team says. "We have introduced Wolfram|Alpha’s body mass index interactive form on our results page. If you search for ‘bmi’ you’ll get the option to enter your height and weight. Click ‘Calculate’ and you’ll get a detailed Body Mass Index analysis directly on Bing."

Bing will also rely on Wolfraph Alpha's ability to solve complex math functions.

Bing says there will be more new features highlighted on the Bing Search Blog over the next few days. The features are just starting to roll out in the US, so it could be a while before you actually see them.

More on the newly announced features, read this post. For more on Bing's integration with Wolfram Alpha specifically, read here.

Will the addition of new search capabilities increase Bing's market share? Share your thoughts.

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Barnes & Noble Says No Nook For Holidays

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:44:33 -0500

Barnes & Noble said today it has sold out of its new nook e-reader due to high demand and shipments will not arrive in time for Christmas.

“nook continues to be the fastest-selling product at Barnes & Noble, and pre-orders have continued to exceed our expectations,” Barnes & Noble said on its eReading blog.

“While we increased production based on the high consumer interest, we’ve sold out of our initial nook allotment available for delivery before the holidays.”

Barnes & Noble said those ordering a nook beginning today should expect their device to begin shipping the week of January 4, 2010. For customers purchasing nooks as holidays gifts, the bookseller has created a holiday certificate, noting an expected January ship date.

The announcement by Barnes & Noble comes a day after Sony said its new electronic reader, the Reader Daily Edition would experience shipping delays. Sony said pre-orders for its latest e-reader would ship between December 18 and January 8, and “an actual delivery date cannot be guaranteed.”

Sony’s Reader Daily Edition sells for $399 while Barnes & Noble’s nook is available for $259.

Barnes & Noble said it is working to increase the supply of its nook in the coming year. “We continue to ramp up nook supply to meet the demand in the New Year,” the company said.

“We’re committed to providing timely updates to our customers on expected nook availability and will do so through in-store, online and our direct-to-customer communications throughout the holiday season.”

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Bebo May Beat Retreat From Australia

Doug Caverly — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:26 -0500

Sometimes you just have to know when to call it quits, and a new report indicates that Bebo has decided now's the time to cut its losses in Australia. Bebo is supposed to end its operations in the country before the end of the year.

Paul McIntyre, who was the first to report this potential move, noted today that nothing official's been announced. He then continued, "However, Bebo has already started informing Australian partners of its exit, which is due in part to Facebook."

And Facebook's growth in Australia has indeed been phenomenal. A director of analytics at Nielsen told McIntyre that Australian Internet users are dedicating about 30 percent of their online hours to Facebook, leading the firm to divide things into "Facebook Time" and "Non Facebook Time."

By comparison, recent Hitwise stats show that Facebook receives about one-fourth of all U.S. page views, and one-seventh of all UK page views.

So it's quite plausible that Bebo will exit Australia, a market in which its performance has been substandard. This would represent a significant loss for AOL, though, which paid $850 million for Bebo last year.

UPDATE: An AOL representative sent us an email that in part read, "We can confirm that there have been some layoffs, but Bebo.com will continue to have a presence in Australia. Bebo has only ever had a small number of sales/support staff on the ground in Australia and San Francisco remains Bebo's headquarters and main operation."

The email then continued, "We are in the process of re-aligning the Bebo business and need to make sure that our resources are aligned with our new business mode in order to execute effectively against our future vision and stay competitive. We are therefore required to make some difficult decisions about the future of our organisation and its people in order to stay competitive, and are exploring the possibility of centralising a number of our business operations and services."

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National Dog Show Available Online At Hulu

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:38:40 -0500

NBC said today "The National Dog Presented by Purina" will be available online Thanksgiving Day (Noon - 2 p.m. in all time zones) at NBCSports.com.

The television broadcast will also be available online after 2 p.m. ET on Hulu.

To complement the TV special and showcase all the breeds, NBCSports.com will feature video of the walks, examination and judging of all the breed-winning dogs with commentary from announce Wayne Ferguson, President of the host Kennel Club of Philadelphia.

NBC is inviting viewers to vote for their favorite group winner in a best in show poll. TV viewers will be able to vote online at NBCSports.com or by texting the word "DOG" to 5155 on their cell phones.

"The success and popularity of the 'National Dog Show' is because it reaches all generations and families can watch the show together," said Jon Miller, Executive Vice President of NBC.

"There is also growing interest in all of the different breeds and we recognize the importance of providing online coverage of each one."

NBC says "The National Dog show" attracted 18.7 million viewers last year, and this year it will again follow the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The show is hosted by John O'Hurley and analyst David Frei.
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Susan Boyle Breaks Amazon Pre-Order Record

Mike Sachoff — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:50:42 -0500

Amazon.com has announced that Susan Boyle's upcoming album, "I Dreamed a Dream," has become its largest global pre-order in the history of the online retail giant.

The album will be released by Sony Music Entertainment on November 23. Boyle became a reality show and Internet sensation after her April 11, 2009 appearance on the TV show "Britain's Got Talent," where she sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Miserables."

"We were excited when Susan Boyle's album became the top CD pre-order in the U.S. We're absolutely ecstatic now that the album has become our largest global CD pre-order," said Craig Pape, senior manager of Music at Amazon.com.

"Looking at the rest of our global Top 5, you see titles that resonated in their local markets. Susan's album is clearly capturing the hearts of our customers around the globe."

A video on the Amazon Music Store allows fans to watch Boyle the first time she sang "I Dreamed a Dream." To watch the video and learn more about Boyle, fans can visit Amazon's Susan Boyle store. Fans can also enter a sweepstakes to win a trip for two to London to have afternoon tea with Boyle.

Boyle's "I Dreamed a Dream" CD is available for pre-order for $9.99 and can be downloaded from Amazon MP3 on November 23.

Here's a list of the Top 5 CD pre-orders of all time for Amazon, along with their top-selling country:

1. Susan Boyle, "I Dreamed a Dream" (2009), U.S.
2. Mr. Children, "Supermarket Fantasy" (2008), Japan
3. Ken Hirai, "Ken Hirai 10th Anniversary Complete Single Collection, '95-'05" (2005), Japan
4. Norah Jones, "Not Too Late" (2007), U.S.
5. Take That, "Never Forget: The Ultimate Collection" (2008), U.K.

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Google Enhances Real Estate Search

Chris Crum — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:51:20 -0500

Google has added some new real estate search features to Google Maps. Earlier this year, Google expanded this functionality by letting you select "real estate" from the "more" menu. Now you can just search for "real estate" or other real estate-related geographical queries and get listings.

"The idea is to make it really easy for you guys - you tell us what you want, and we get it back to you! Of course, we'll continue to work to return the best results for all your Google Maps queries, whether you're looking for local businesses, geographic features, or your perfect home," Google says in an announcement on its Australian blog.

Are you familiar with Google's Place Pages? These are pages for businesses that Google creates for listings in Google Maps. They launched this feature earlier this year also. Now real estate listings have their own place pages as well.

"Now clicking the 'more info' link next to a listing takes you to a faster, easier-to-read page that gives you all of the information we have about a listing: photos, inspection times, videos, details, a Street View preview and nearby public transit information if available, allowing you to quickly find the listing you want and click through to the sources of the listing," explains Google.

As Matt McGee at Search Engine Land points out, Google has shown individual property info for a while now, but this provides a much more user-friendly approach. Google Maps may start to be considered the place to go to find real estate online.

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