In a couple of weeks there's going to be an important Joomla Developer Conference in New York. Starting with a social evening on the Friday 4th, the conference itself is a two-dayer over the weekend of the 5th and 6th. There's also a hands-on development event on Monday. The location is beautiful: the Faculty House at Columbia University. Click here for full hotel and attendee information. Click here to register for the two day conference. Around 40 tickets are still available and they cost $100. Read more...

We've always used Joomla as our blog platform of choice here at Alledia. People are  always surprised by that, which is pleasing ... it took a lot of work. We needed a whole variety of different extensions to create the normal features of a blog. Because it requires quite a bit of effort, Joomla developers have long looked enviously at Wordpress and the default blogging features it has. Several have tried to bridge Wordpress into Joomla including MojoBlog. The latest and perhaps the most comprehensive is WordPress for Joomla by corePHP.com. Read more...

I had time to take a good look at the Alpha version of Joomla 1.6 this weekend. The Art of Joomla is doing a great job of explaining new features. I'll also blog later about the new SEO features ... they've taken on board of a lot our recommendations including the ability to control the metadata for each page! However, today thought I'd hightlight some nice usability improvements. Several common frustrations that beginners had with 1.5 seem to have been resolved: 1) The "Menu Manager" Has a Purpose In 1.5 beginners always expect the Menu Manager to do much more ... such as actually manage something. In 1.6 the Menu Manager is much more closely integrated with the display of menu links. Oh, and you no longer get those four confusing boxes when making a new menu: Read more...

Google recently announced their fade in homepage. From a marketing perspective I think it is interesting to try to figure out why they did that. Marissa Mayer wrote: the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change... and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed. I think there are 3 big reasons to consider such a test it is now impossible for any competitor to win by being viewed as more minimalistic (on the homepage, anyhow) as Google noises up their search results with various verticals (from their universal search) they want to remind searchers how beautiful and minimalistic and elegant Google is to get people to pay more attention to the ads below the search box (making them appear a second later makes them POP much more than if those directed ads were there right off the start...and as Google enters more verticals with new features they will use that announcement area on the homepage much more often) The blank page conveys simplicity even as Google dominates new verticals by becoming more complex. Such initial perceptions matter a lot in marketing. You see people quote your site as being advanced or basic or some such, and when some such statements skew in the direction that is opposite reality that comes down to mis-perceptions. We are planning on doing a new site design soon(ish) because while our site design was perfect for what it was back then (a personal blog about SEO) as our site has bolted on so many pieces (training + community +newsletter + tools) that I think the design doesn't fit all the stuff we have added to it. If you shift with the market but do not shift your design it is a bit of mixed messaging, and anything that increases doubt or confusion is a tax on conversion.

Recently on Twitter a couple people mentioned that we should create tools similar to our Firefox extensions for Google Chrome. Then on TechCrunch there was a comment "As soon as I see the SEO Book toolbar for Chrome, I’ll be glad to uninstall Firefox." I read that and thought news to me. First of all I think it is a bad idea because if Google owns the search engine and the browser then maybe that is not the best spot to have your SEO research stuff hooked up, but even beyond that I don't think we would make $1 more by creating those tools. Why? Because the people who use Google Chrome for SEO research are not the type of people who want to pay for anything related to SEO (outside of buying links perhaps). My buddy Patrick from BlogStorm mentioned 'Imagine all the links you would get from people writing about the "Top 10 Chrome Extensions for SEO"' but when you think about it, what kinds of "customers" would those links bring? Entitled demanding and rude non-customers who pollute our sales funnel and waste our time. Eh...not really worth it. Today a person running a COMMERCIAL SEO company told me "One of my employees loves the hubfinder and is now distraught that it's not free anymore. What would it take to get access to that tool?" And I responded with "if they are distraught over $300 then frankly they are quite pathetic, IMHO." He wants to CHARGE his clients, PAYS his employees, and then wants my time FOR FREE to ask how he could get FREE access to the fruits of our labor. Distraught? Really? I couldn't imagine having the audacity to send that message. And the truth is...that is 99%+ of the SEO market...everything should be free except whatever they sell. But we have to PAY $1,000+ a month for a web host, PAY for our vBulletin license, PAY for our SupportSuite license, PAY to license data from other sources, PAY to create tools to collect data, PAY to create new tools, PAY to maintain tools, PAY to advertise, PAY for a design + redesign, PAY for additional servers working creatively on future projects, PAY for the risks associated with being a well known public SEO, PAY to fly out to speak at SEO conferences & share information, PAY for upgrades to the site, SPEND lots of time on creating content for the blog, PAY PAY PAY etc etc etc We have subscriptions with services like Compete.com and WordTracker because to us they are worth it.Which is why we buy AdWords ads, certain links, access to other sites and services, desktop software like AdvancedWebranking, etc. I have easily spent $100,000's on consulting, tools, and info-products. Was every purchase profitable? No. But in aggregate, there was plenty of profit to be had. The people who are selling stuff but who are afraid to spend any money themselves often sell trash. They are not convinced in the value of what they sell (often because it is lacking). Or as Seth puts it... Money is more than a transfer of value. It's a statement of belief. An ad agency that won't buy ads, a consultant who won't buy consulting, and a waiter who doesn't tip big—it's a sign, and not a good one. You don't create a real business by being the free infrastructure for someone else's business while giving it away AND providing 1:1 support. That is why open source works so well...give away the software, but if they want 1:1 support from the source they pay for it. $$$ Yes we could use more links, but that is not a weakness in our business right now...we have something like a quarter million people using our stuff. If anything, I would love to donate some of this site's links to a few of our affiliate websites. ;) Imagine having a quarter million+ non-customers. If you are at that scale your problem is not finding a way to get more people at the top of the funnel. At that scale the issue more becomes filtering out the bottom portion of the market without offending the people who might potentially become customers. Assume 5% of the 250,000 people are entitled ___holes. Assume another 5% of them are great people who just happened to have a minor issues in the conversion process (forgot their username, picked the wrong username, registered under the wrong email address, didn't get the welcome email, etc.). Could you imagine handling 25,000+ personal emails a year? Add in paying customers & media inqueries and now your up above 30,000. And that doesn't even include making close to 1,000 posts a month in our member forums and reading the nearly 100,000 posts that have been made there! I love the work I do (and love helping people), but I think this really expresses the sentiment nicely. I had to add the following to our support feedback section to help make the pollution from non-customers more manageable Free SEO Tool Issues? A Polite Warning for Non-customers We run the best SEO website with the deepest and richest customer engagement. But our resources are finite and our time is valuable. We Give Away Lots of Value, But Our Company is Small At the same time we have given away some of our free SEO tools to over 100,000 webmasters. We can not provide 1 to 1 support to an audience that large while still providing the amazing customer experience that our paying customers have grown to appreciate and expect. If you are not a PAYING member then we expect you to read the installation and usage documentation before filing a ticket. Did You Read The Usage Instructions? Please note that if you are not a PAYING customer AND your issue is with our free SEO tools then we will NOT respond to ANY requests where you have not read the installation and operating instructions from the associated download pages. SEO Tool Usage + Configuration Instructions For your convenience here are links to the official resource centers for SEO 4 Firefox, Rank Checker, the SEO Toolber, & the download page. (The download page requires you set up a free account and login to it). Need to Uninstall a Tool? If you would like to uninstall something here are 2 ways to do that. In his book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky stated something along the lines of popularity being an imbalance between supply and demand of attention. Which is precisely why filtering is so important. If you don't filter out the laggards and freetards you are only holding back your own potential while giving your paying customers an inferior service to what they deserve. Eventually it gets to where filtering through that noise becomes nearly a full time job. (Lucky for me I work twice as long as just about anyone I know), but anything that makes the sign up process more complex creates more noise (which potentially eats your time + harms your brand while creating 0 income). Plus the above quoted piece from our support section might turn off some potential clients...but it is always a game of filtering...help as many people as you can and hopefully try not to offend many people. What we are scarce on is time. And that is also what many people new to SEO are scarce on. And what people who are willing to pay for correct information with rich context are short on. Working through all the hype and misinformation and scammy offers can be a bit overwhelming. To a person who is new to SEO, it is already confusing enough to decide... which tools offer real value if they should use any software if they should use free or paid tools what combination of software to use And if we duplicate our tools for many different browsers then that ends up increasing the maintenance cost WHILE harming conversion rates (because people don't know what they should chose, or why you have so many tools doing the same thing). The capital and efforts spent creating (and maintaining) a second or third set of duplicative free SEO tools would be better spent creating more paid tool & content for our paying subscribers.

Following on from my our "Social Media Guruism: Mostly Harmless" yesterday, we received the following comment: On the surface, this seems like a great article...until you realize that it's really just like most tweets--a total waste of time. If you wanted to really provide something valuable, you'd show me how you directly measure your social marketing campaign...Oh wait, you can't. Why? First, cause you've probably never run one and you're just regurgitating what other people have told you. And second, because ROI really doesn't translate for most Internet campaigns. There's just no way to directly measure it because there are so many random variables. And I challenge anyone to prove that it can be Thanks for the response, Fearless Advisor! Really, social media marketing is no different to other forms of marketing in that it must eventually demonstrate value and be accountable. The "Why" Question One of the points I made in the previous article was that a lot of people seem to confuse the medium with the message. They are using a communication channel - in this case Twitter & Facebook - without first deciding why they are doing it. Sometimes, the answer might be no more complicated than "because it's new", "because it sounded good" or "because everyone else is doing it". However, if a marketing campaign is to be successful, and repeated, it must be measured. How would you know if it was a success, or be worth repeating otherwise? The fist step should be to ask "why"? The same question applies to any marketing campaign, be it search marketing, radio, television, or anything else. Why does this website exist? Why am I doing this and what result am I trying to achieve? Is it to boost traffic? Is it to make more money? Is it to cut costs in other marketing activities by replacing one with another? Is it to grow the RSS subscriber base? Get more links? Grow the mail list? A combination of all these things? And how do these relate back to the purpose of the site? Without that knowledge, the exercise is one of faith. Demonstrate Value The top social media marketers, just like the top search marketers, can create enormous value. And they can show it. If clients aren't demanding it now, they soon will. Back when I was doing search marketing for clients, I was in a sales meeting with a large mobile telecommunications company. I was doing my best to sell them on the benefits of search marketing and from the nods I was getting, I thought I was doing ok. At the end of the meeting, they said I was the first search guy who had talked to them in terms they could relate to - i.e. I was talking marketing, as opposed to hype and technology. Social media marketing is going through the same growing- up phase that search marketing did. As search marketing clients got more savvy and gained experience with the new channel, they started to demand more traditional metrics - meaningful metrics related to the underlying business objectives - that could be analysed alongside their other marketing campaigns. Measurement Ideas Measurement depends on the aims of the campaign. Here are a some common measurements used in marketing campaigns, and apply equally to social media as they do other marketing channels. Not all these measurements are appropriate, or achievable, but should serve as a starting point when considering measurement. 1. Increased Revenue This measurement is straightforward. What was the level of business the client was doing before the social media campaign, and what is the level they are doing afterwards? Has it dropped, stayed the same, or risen? 2. Competitive Advantage Has the client gained competitive advantage? Do a before/after comparison against competitors. Is the client doing better in Compete/Alexa/etc than their competitors after they ran the social media campaign? Have the competitors run social media campaigns? Can you do a similar before/after comparison on their success, or lack thereof? 3. Increased Visitor Numbers Are there more visitors now than there were before the campaign started? Break the visitors down by channel using referral data. Who are they? Where are they from? Are they the right demographic? 4. Reach/Spreading The Word Perhaps the most difficult aspect to measure. Research companies, like Neilsen, use Buzz Metrics and Blog Pulse to measure how many people are talking about a brand or company. Similarly, Google Trends can be used to pinpoint spikes in attention across the net. Is your message/brand mentioned more often after the campaign? Are there more mentions across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream media? 5. Search Activity Do more people search on a clients brand after the social media campaign? Do they use queries relating to the clients message, products or services? 6. Primary Market Research Big companies tend to do this more so than smaller companies. Run field studies, focus groups, and interviews to determine the level of brand awareness. 7. Links Has the client received more links? This is one of the huge value propositions of social media, especially when combined with SEO. Social media can be such a powerful link building method, second to none. Yeah, But How? Perhaps the social media gurus can tell us? :) These are the types of metrics clients will demand. If I were buying social media marketing services - and might well be in the near future - these are the metrics I'd demand. No one, except the clueless, will be impressed by follower numbers. There is no one tool that can measure and track all this data. Hey, perhaps there is a market opportunity for someone! But while we're waiting for such a tool to emerge, measurement is a multi-disciplinary approach, combining both tools and techniques. Consider analytics, behavior tracking, dedicated tracking codes for links, coupon codes that can only be seen on Facebook or Twitter, unique phone numbers used to track just that one campaign, customer surveys after they have bought something. I'm sure social media professionals have got a wealth of techniques and tools they use. It would be great if you could share your knowledge with the community in the comments :) Why A Social Media Marketer Should Do This The end result is that clients will spend more, on an ongoing basis, if they can see demonstrable value. A company may do a one-off campaign for fun, as an experiment, or because they think it is trendy to do so, but they'll soon move on to the "next big thing" unless social media can demonstrate how it helps them achieve their marketing goals. Some of the above is easy, some is difficult. It depends on the client and their goals. There will always be intangible rewards when it comes to brand building and raising awareness, but you can't know if you're winning the game if you don't keep score. I know some social media marketers already do this. Like the top search marketers, they will be the only ones left standing, and prospering once the hype dies off. And it will.

Marissa Mayer announces that Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in Google's search results. We look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information. Hmmm..."product"? Obviously something a bit smarter that simply providing raw indexing and display. This move follows Bing's recent announcement - today, in fact - they would do likewise. We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think. Microsoft has pulled off a similar deal with Facebook, which has six times as many users as Twitter. With two competing deep pocketed players signing up, how long can Twitter remain unsold? Will Google build a competing version of Twitter? Much easier to crunch link data and index in real time if you can backend updates with your own systems, rather than making sense of third-party date, like Twitter, which is probably a nightmare. Some cosy integration arrangement is probably part of the deal, of course. Read-Write-Web made the valid point that Google grew when they signed a similar deal with Yahoo. Now Twitter is doing likewise, serving their stuff to Google's massive audience. However, given Twitters notorious fail-whale flakiness, it remains to be seen if their system is ready for the roar of traffic that will soon come their way. What Does This Mean For SEOs? Go where the search engines do. Link to your content from Twitter. Publish excerpts and link-backs. Monitor real-time search trends, using Google's Hot Trends and trend data tools, such as TweetStats. Supply content to match demand. It will be interesting to see if real-time search, on a Google scale, produces new business models. The traffic bursts should ample reward for being seen first for popular real time queries. The news business relies on immediacy, and they just got a whole new wave of unpaid competition.

Marketing taps into our emotions, as Rory Sutherland shares in this great TED speech Online any good idea that works well is quickly cloned by competitors. Both the larger competitors with piles of money AND those who are driven by money so much that they would sell their own mothers for a nickel. This fierce competition for attention forces continuous (perceived) value add. Some of that is created through innovation and/or branding. But it also encourages sustainable margin creation by criminals through outright fraud. As long as there is an optimized conversion funnel, someone will step in and connect supply and demand. Take, for instance, the rise of fake security software: "They'll take your credit card information, any personal information you've entered there and they've got your machine," he said, referring to some rogue software's ability to rope a users' machine into a botnet, a network of machines taken over to send spam or worse. ... TrafficConverter.biz, which has been shut down, had boasted that its top affiliates earned as much as $332,000 a month for selling scam security software, according to Weafer. I am not so sure if earned was the right word. Stole, maybe? But when the product is layer upon layer of fraud, it is easy to pay out a high bounty for customers, especially when you use their computers to set up bot nets to further spread spam. Worse yet, any level of popularity or credibility you gain with a legitimate business needs to be protected because people will trade off it. Yesterday in our support section Brian Menhennett wrote Hello Do you know or know of a Mr ____ ___ who claims to be associated with seob____.net and takes money for search engine optimization in your name If you do can you please advise me of a contact email address. Kind regards And, after hearing my response that I did not know the guy, I got this back Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately if I cannot find or contact ____ ___, whom I paid $10000 to do a SEO job that was not completed, then I have no alternative than to spread the word on a campaign of facebook, twitter, myspace and other social media pages and blogs to advise potential customers of the situation. Again, unfortunately, as your company name was used to procure the $10,000 contract so your company will be included in the campaign. If you have any information on this person it would be greatly appreciated. So people register similar domain names, point them at legit sites, and then start selling to people who can't tell the difference. And then rather than taking the opportunity to learn from the honest person, such ignorant people want to smear your brand for their own ignorance and stupidity. As though lashing out at me will get him his money back or cure him of his ignorance. For every person who wants to learn to earn and become an expert there are hundreds or thousands looking for free money. And so they buy hyped scams from career con men...the only people willing to service them selling a "dream" package (with no substance) at the price they are willing to pay. A similarly polluting marketing strategy that harms legit sales strategies is the sell the "anyone can do it" angle. When you sell the story of "mentally ill blind grandmother who just got an 8080 computer last week accidentally unlocks unbelievable secret blueprint to make millions per month, working 1 hour per day, printing cash from the nursing home, with one hand amputated" there is a segment of the population that will buy into such pitches. And that type of desperate / gullible / greedy / intellectually lazy person is often the easiest to influence by advertising. They are the 8% of the web that clicks 85% of display ads. And once they buy one scam they will buy another. And then another. They are caveman clickers who buy buy buy. They tend to have thousands of Dollars of revolving credit card debt and a pile of useless junk they don't need. Debt slaves thinking that "this time is different." This is why Bing traffic converts better than Google does. And this is why AOL traffic often converts better than Bing does. Stereotypes can be bad, but demographics are visible in conversion statistics, just like they are in ad click-through rates. See the following chart built from millions of ad impressions and hundreds of thousands of ad clicks Automated ad networks syndicate whatever ads have the highest yield. When a product is layer upon layer of fraud it is easy to pay out a high bounty for customers - so ads promoting scams deliver a high yield, and are thus distributed everywhere. This is why the Fox News article blasting SEO as a scam carried the following wonderful advertisements by scumbag affiliates who set up fake newspapers to carry fake advertorials Where this becomes a problem for marketers is when you come up with an unbelievably good promotion that is honest. Why? Well people are going to become more skeptical of the altruistic offer, especially if they do not know you. We did one such promotion recently that failed because affiliates pushing offers like the above "security software" simply polluted the space with junk. A once remarkable formula now creates something that is either unremarkable or unbelievable - due to a proliferation of scams that (at first glance) look somewhat similar. A friend who launched a cool free software tool recently had the same problem - people asking "what's the catch?" The modern day robber baron bankers and slimy affiliates who whore out anything that makes a Dollar create an economic environment where people become more cynical and less trusting. Which makes it that much harder to give away value and hope for eventual returns to come in. If the publicity never comes then you just end up giving away money and getting nothing in return - a failed business strategy. Years ago a professor did not want to link to one of my sites because he thought it was too pure with no ads. It was simply too good to be true. If I dirtied up the site with ads it would have been more linkworthy to him! And in the years to come, as the lines between media and advertising continue to blur, many people will become more like that savvy professor. What is the solution? There are a couple options IMHO. You either need to dirty up your strategy to make it look less altruistic OR you need to be well known by the community BEFORE you launch a major promotion. Publishing becomes more about developing and maintaining relationships in the industry. Online marketers will need to be good at 1 or more of the following to remain profitable... promoting scams (or carry ads from 3rd party networks that promote scams) building an economic reward system directly in the distribution channel (like the often hyped internet marketer product launches) leveraging ego-bait marketing (a type of payment that costs ~ $0, except for when it backfires!) mastering conversion and value-add sales techniques becoming publishers who own media brands with strong user loyalty + affinity + distribution (even Google is recommending this, BTW)

Patrick Altoft highlighted how Matthew Trewhella (from Google) may have tipped Google's hand a bit about what was known as the Vince / brand update: Matthew [said] the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search Google regards it as their failure for not bring up the right result the first time. So what Google is doing is testing which results are going to give the least number of secondary searches and displaying those. In the past somebody might have searched for “travel insurance” and found a few good sites before remembering that the Post Office does travel insurance too and searched for them to get a comparison. For Google this is regarded as a bit of a failure because they didn’t bring up the Post Office in the first place. Understanding the bold part above also highlights why Google dislikes many affiliate based business models. Google views itself as the affiliate, and if Google sends the searcher through an affiliate page which does not add significant value (ie: no coupon, no in depth original editorial review, no value add comparisons, etc.) then they feel the extra click was a failure. Microsoft's ad lab offers a search funnels tool which allows you to view what searches occurred prior to or after a search for a particular keyword. If you look at some of the above branded keywords associated with credit cards you will see those brands ranking in Google's search results for credit cards. About 3 weeks ago Dave Peiris highlighted a similar set of theories about the Google update, noting how some of the related searches seemed to be driven in some cases by the next search query. If user satisfaction remains constant or increases slightly (as one might expect it to, since brand is in part driven by exposure, and we tend to like & trust things that we are aware of more) with such algorithmic changes then you can expect Google to keep pushing them on more and more keywords (at least until it starts to harm relevancy slightly). Why? Google would prefer to police a few thousand companies rather than policing millions of individuals (this is equally true for organic search and AdWords) AdWords is approaching a natural price ceiling in many markets based on direct advertiser ROI (and perhaps some related measures like lifetime customer value) as Google's display ad network grows they will get more taste of the branding ad dollars (from when you try to advertise to build a brand right on through when they are cashing in on your branding efforts by selling ads against it) promoting brands helps promote irrational and wasteful and abstract advertising campaigns that can only attempt to be justified when thinking about (and guesstimating) the broader branding impacts of the additional exposure advertising creates search volume. with fewer and fewer people clicking traditional display ads (8% of the Internet user base accounts for 85% of all clicks) Google needs to find a way to ensure that publishers are still getting some credit AND as Google plasters ads over 75% of the web they want to can claim such ads indeed did help drive conversions to further help justify the ad spend (hence the recent view-through conversion AdWords data-point) Many thin website models (unremarkable thin affiliate, AdSense publisher with thin keyword-targeted content, etc.) will slowly get chipped away at by such algorithms if Google moves this down the query stream (though they can't go too deep into the longtail with it or they would start impacting relevancy in a negative way). As an SEO, this query recycling concept (if expanded) means that you not only want to rank, but you want to deliver ***an experience*** remarkable enough that people actively search it out by name. And you want to be one of the first couple brands that people think of for your core target keyword. Search is already heavily influenced by a rich get richer effect and the concept of cumulative advantage. And with search engines potentially feeding search query chains back into the relevancy algorithms, it gets that much harder to come from behind in saturated markets unless you change the model or target different keywords. If you are late to the game and a #10 player it might make sense to brand yourself against the second largest keyword rather than being an after-thought in a more saturated keyword market.

Posted by randfishFirst off, apologies for my absence from the blog these past few days. It's been an incredibly busy time, trying to wrap things up before I leave for San Diego over the holidays. So much for a December lull... In this post, I'm going to try tackling a lot of the recent trends we've been observing from the engines and talk about my personal perception of what's to come over the next 12 months.  #1 - This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here Microsoft initially beat Google to the punch in announcing their integration with Twitter data in their SERPs. And in response, last Monday, Google released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration that's nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this case, I think it's seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search enthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance. As Danny Sullivan notes, it's like we're back to Infoseek in 1997. If you want to rank #1, don't worry about quality content, relevance or popularity, just be the last person to Tweet about a topic and you'll come out on top (at least, for a few seconds). This is, in my estimation (and many others), the worst implementation of new results Google's ever implemented. I imagine the clickthrough and abandonment stats have their usability folks up in arms already, and it's only to preserve face from a PR perspective (as well as an increasingly prideful attitude of "Don't like it? So what are you gonna do about it?" that Aaron Wall describes in a gutting fashion here) that this has stayed in place as long as it has (1.5 weeks). In 2010, I think this fades away. Perhaps not entirely, but we won't be seeing it for nearly as many queries with the prevalence we do today. Google may love real time, and it's certainly gotten them a lot of press (though very little of it is entirely positive), but they can't continue sacrificing quality for PR in this fashion. I think the engineers still run things over there, and the stats data is already making them balk. Although I don't have numbers, my impression is that we're already way down in the quantity of queries showing real time results compared to last week. #2 - Twitter's "Link Graph" is the Real Deal All that real-time integration bashing aside, I'm a firm believer in my original hypothesis that Twitter is cannibalizing the web's link graph. In fact, I think a rough history of "recommendation sources" looks something like: Google has always strived to keep up with the latest ways that content is being recommended and suggested. It's how they determined popularity and relevance with PageRank and I think Twitter's data is merely the next evolution. Just yesterday, they launched their own URL shortening service (I think this was more to get data, but it's also possible it was a pre-emptive PR strike against bit.ly, who launched their PRO service just a day later).  Google's not going to just take raw number of tweets or re-tweets. I think we're already seeing the relevance and reputation calculations in their decisions of which tweets and sources to show in the real-time results, and I expect that algorithms/metrics like PageRank, TrustRank, etc. will find their way into how Google uses the real-time data. Today, SEOs want to turn tweets into links so they can get SEO benefit. My feeling is that tweets are going to carry their own weight in helping pages rank in the not-too-distant future. #3 - Personalized Search is Here to Stay Unlike real-time's temporal nature in the results, I think personalized search is here for the long haul. Google released their "permanent" personalization of results last week, and Bing released their own just this week. As usual, SearchEngineLand's coverage is impeccable, though one big question remains in my mind: What metrics impact personalization? Is it merely clickthroughs from the organic results? Does visit history play a role? Or clicks from other vertical search services Google offers? What about clicks from paid search ads - either in the SERPs or from AdSense/DoubleClick? I'd love to see experimentation done on this front so marketers have a better idea what they're dealing with. If it's proven that you can get organic benefits by attracting PPC clickthrough, this may be the new "paid inclusion" for 2010, and could drive bid prices up massively as companies compete not only for paid listing clicks, but for the chance to earn "organic" positioning as well. Personalization means a few things for SEOs, but it doesn't fundamentally change the game, IMO: The Rich Get Richer - It's now truer than ever. If you rank well, and earn solid traffic, you're going to be even harder to unseat. Startups and upstarts are going to have an even greater uphill battle to climb than before. Branding is More Important - you want your loyal visitors and fans scouring the SERPs for your listings, and clicking them more so than anything else. I expect some clever spammers are going to be manipulating this with everything from Mechanical Turk to virus infections that make their browser search for their brand and click those results. We'll see if Google has good protections in place to defend against this. There is No Normal Ranking - Or, at least, there's no "normal" ranking that's "average" in a personalized SERPs world. Rank tracking may still carry some value to understand how non-personalized searchers see your pages, but that data is going to be less useful in comparison to what your analytics report about search traffic and the trends. Win the "personalization" battle, and you may start to care less about the classic "rankings" battle. Whenever we encounter these "paradigm changing" events in the SEO world, I like to go back to my philosophy about SEO fundamentals. From what I can see, it looks like things haven't changed enough yet to warrant panic. It's been a massively dynamic 3 months, but we're not on the precipice of anything that's going to shift SEO in the ways some previous "game-changers" have. #4 - It's Going to Be a Two-Engine, 80/20 World The latest figures suggest that Google continues to slowly gain market share in the US, while Bing & Yahoo! compete for share that will eventually belong to them both (once the regulatory hurdles clear, which I think they will). I believe that a year from now, most webmasters will be looking at a scenario where Comscore/Hitwise reports Binghoo! has ~25-28% market share, but those engines combine to send a little under 20% of all search traffic (remember that they count searches on all Microsoft and Yahoo! properties - even internal searches - while Google tends to send the vast majority of their search traffic externally to other sites). #5 - Site Explorer & Linkdomain will Disappear Tragically, everything I hear out of Yahoo! and Bing is that Site Explorer is off to the great beyond. The expense of maintaining a web index isn't something Yahoo!'s willing to invest in once they don't have to, and Bing's given no indication that they're going to re-open the portal to link information. The best we can hope for is an acceleration in the functionality offered by Bing Webmaster Tools, but even that's unlikely to offer competitive link intelligence. I'm guessing other services will rise up to try to take Site Explorer's place, as the service had millions of monthly queries run against it. #6 - SEO Spending Will Rise Dramatically Forrester put out a great report on US Interactive Marketing Spend (a little pricey at $1749, but interesting). Two graphics struck me as particularly compelling: SEO trails only social media and online video as places where marketers (not just search marketers, but ALL marketers) will be shifting dollars. Meanwhile, SEO continues to outpace PPC in terms of CAGR. We've still got a long way to go before balance is established between the share of clicks SEO commands and the fraction of spend it receives, but the gap is slowly closing. #7 - 2010 is the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization If I were doing another startup today, it would focus on software for conversion rate optimization. I think this is still the most under-utilized and highest ROI activities in the marketing department, but more awareness is on its way. CRO isn't just about testing; it's about building a process for improving converion over time. Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this, yet few invest. I think 2010 is the year, simply because it's an inflexion point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value. These guys are likely in for a blockbuster year; I wish I could invest :-) This graphic comes via my post on choosing which Internet Marketing Channel to Pursue. #8 - More Queries will Send Less Traffic Google & Bing are both doing more to make their visitors stickier and get their queries answered without ever having to leave the engine. This is a good product practice for both companies, and I'm surprised Google's taken so long to move away from their "get people off Google" point-of-view, but it's definitely happening. Check out some recent examples: Everything I need to know is right there - the last game score, the record, the opponent, their next match day and time. The only thing missing? What channel it's playing on in my area. I don't even have to complete my query! Google's got that weather report sitting in the suggest box. They wrote about this feature here which launched last week. Google O/S had another good post on the topic. Thankfully, I'm not actually headed to Kodiak, but those results are pretty spiffy, and are likely to prevent me from needing to visit Alaskaair.com and get that flight info. The customer service number is something Bing's started to provide more and more (though there's one company even they don't have that data on). With Fedex, you don't even need to leave Bing to track a package (Google also offers similar functionality). My perception is that the more the engines can apply "instant answers" to search queries, the more they will, and the less any other sites will see traffic from those queries. It's a better user experience this way, and I'm certain it's one of the biggest things that engenders loyalty and return queries - something both engines are desperately competing for.     This post isn't intended to be one-sided, and I'd love to hear from you - do you agree? Disagree? Think I'm out of my head? Let everyone know :-)Do you like this post? Yes No

Posted by great scott!Not unlike investing, when it comes to link acquisition diversity is key.  Evidence points to a strong preference by the engines for a diverse link profile rather than a homogeneous one, even if the links in a narrow profile are from strong sites. In this week's WBF, we'll look at why a wide variety of linking domains is better than repeated links, even from very strong domains: it's all about trust. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Link Diversity from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.Do you like this post? Yes No

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Yahoo! has a new update that serves up some personalization into search results. Let's say you're searching for pizza. You'll now get results for pizza places in your area, despite not including a location in your query: As you can see, there are also links so that you can refine your search to an even narrower neighborhood or town within a greater metro area. Additionally, Yahoo! will serve up the local biz shortcut when it recognizes you're searching an establishment in your town: This is a great implementation of personalized search. And it shouldn't be too threatening to SEOs, who should be focused on local search as part of their overall search strategy.

The Google Analytics API was launched last April and then updated with a few more features in September. Now, developers are getting access to additional advanced features. Here's what's included in the API update: Support for Advanced Segments - Originally unveiled over a year ago, developers are getting two ways to use advanced segements via the API: Create them on the fly by specifying their expression directly through an API query. Use advanced segments created in the Google Analytics web interface through the API. Goal 5-20 and Configuration Data - Analytics recently increased the number of goals allowed from 5 to 20. Developers can now access 48 metrics regarding goal performance. Custom Variables - 10 new dimensions are now available to access custom variable data.

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeThis this handed to me, Newsknife has just published a ranking of the Top News Sites of 2009. The big story is that Newsknife's combined figures for sites owned by Rupert Murdoch put them in second place at a time when Murdoch has declared his unhappiness with Google News. (Methinks the media mogul doth protest too much.) The Top News Sites of 2009 is compiled by Newsknife from its analysis of more than 311,000 listings by over 7,400 news sites at Google News during the year. Here are the news sources you are most likely to find in Google News: 1 Associated Press 2 Rupert Murdoch related sites - Times Online, UK / Wall Street Journal / FOX News 3 New York Times 4 Reuters 5 CNN 6 Washington Post 7 Los Angeles Times 8 BBC News, UK 9 Voice of America 10 Bloomberg This is the eighth year of Newsknife's "Top News Sites" ratings. Newsknife's ratings are based on monitoring the main US-oriented Google News site. Associated Press headed its Top Sites for the first time. I covered this topic last week in my post, "Living Stories is Google's Way of Telling Murdoch to 'Buzz Off.'" But it seems like a great time to play the interview with Jeff Jarvis again. Hey, he made these comments after his keynote at SES Chicago 2009 -- but before the Newsknife number were available. And he was dead on target. What would Google do, Jeff Jarvis, slams Rupert Murdoch over Google's role at SES ChicagoRelated articles by ZemantaIf The WSJ.com Says Goodbye To Google, It Will Also Say Goodbye To 25 Percent Of Its Traffic (techcrunch.com)Murdoch barters Google links for Microsoft cash (blogs.ft.com)Can News Corp. afford calling Google's bluff? (news.cnet.com)Google to Murdoch: Whatever, Dude [Google] (gizmodo.com)A Glimpse of Google without News Corp.: No Big Loss (gawker.com)

Image by Bruce Clay, Inc via FlickrThere were seven solo presentations at SES Chicago 2009, which reflects a change in format for some of the topics covered at the conference and the consistently high rantings that some speakers have received over the years. One of those solo presentations, which was given by Christine Churchill, president of KeyRelevance.com, was on keyword research. So, how many keywords do you need in your paid search account? What keywords are your customers searching for? How do customers find products after they reach your site? Watch the video below to learn how to target the right terms in your paid and organic search marketing, and where these keywords should be used. How to do keyword research with Christine Churchill at SES Chicago 2009 Related articles by ZemantaThe missing step in keyword research (mikemoran.com)Google AdWords New Beta Keyword Tool (seroundtable.com)Sunday Morning SEO: Long Tail Keyword Research With Google Analytics (blogherald.com)

About a year ago, LinkedIn launched a new search platform, which has turned out to be wildly successful. Search activity has doubled since the update. Of course, their membership has almost doubled as well. No word on whether the chicken or the egg came first on that one. Either way, LinkedIn is improving their search platform with the addition of filters. The filter options are automatically generated and are placed down the left side of the results. Let's say I want to find someone to network with because I'm interested in a job there. I could click on "San Francisco" because that's where their HQ is (well, near). Then, on 2nd connection (because at least that would be someone in my network who knows somebody). Last, I could check the filter for Autdesk under "currently working." I'm left with 7 people to try and contact. That's much better than sifting through the original 25,000 results! This is a great update to an already robust search platform. It reduces the need to come up with search refinements on your own, making LinkedIn's search more efficient - and networking a LOT easier.

Google's had StreetView for awhile and Bing recently introduced Streetside imaging to their maps. Now, MapQuest is entering the ring with their street-level imaging, which they've dubbed "360 View." 360 View isn't available everywhere, so MapQuest is providing coverage maps, similar to what a wireless communications company might provide to show you where you can get a signal. MapQuest also took great care in pointing out that you don't have to download a non-standard media player (cough, cough Silverlight).

Coincidence or not, in the wake of Firefox recommending their users switch to Bing, Google launched a nationwide campaign advertising Chrome in the UK today. This follows a recent TV and print campaign in Italy appealing to trendy 'stilisti' (fashionistas) suggesting users gift wrap Chrome for Christmas. So, is this why Google has been talking up page speed as a ranking factor recently? Techcrunch has a writeup of how many people Chrome may reach via a cover wrap of the Metro and Journalism.co.uk has a picture which is worth a snigger - Chrome advertised right outside Ruper Murdoch's offices in Wapping. Meanwhile at Incisive towers, we are tittering to ourselves (ok just me and Darren, our ad trafficker) that Chrome still does not support Doubleclick's Dart for Publishers... we guess Murdoch really won't be switching anytime soon.

We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues. Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you'll find how fast your pages load, how they've fared over time, how your site's load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features. We only show the performance charts and tables when there's enough data, so not all of them may be shown if your site has little traffic. The data currently represents a global average; a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.This is a Labs product that is still in development. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know your feedback through the Webmaster Tools Forum.Update on 12/04/2009: Our team just reconvened to provide you more information on this feature. Check out JohnMu's latest post on Site Performance!Posted by Sreeram Ramachandran, Software Engineer & Arvind Jain, Director, Faster Web program

Webmaster Level: IntermediateToday we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved "robots" that process the web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the "check if we're allowed to crawl this page" mechanism is robots.txt.Publishers could easily contact us via a form if they didn't want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google's web search index. Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners can just add Googlebot-News specific directives to their robots.txt file. Similar to the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be crawled and ultimately appear in Google News. Here are a few examples for publishers:Include pages in both Google web search and News:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow:This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow:User-agent: Googlebot-NewsDisallow: /This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google's general web crawler, called Googlebot, but the user agent "Googlebot-News" is blocked from all files on the website.Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /User-agent: Googlebot-NewsDisallow:When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific directive. The first two lines tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google's web index) is blocked from crawling any pages from the site. The next directive, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News, overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the website.Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /latest_newsUser-agent: Googlebot-NewsDisallow: /archivesThe pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:User-agent: GooglebotDisallow: /This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler, should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific directive for Googlebot-News is given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages for Google News.For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images, Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as Universal search results. Since Google News powers Universal "News" search results, if you block the Googlebot-News user agent then your site's news stories won't be included in Universal search results.We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems please let us know. Note that it is possible for Google to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn't crawl that page. If you'd like to read more about robots.txt, we provide additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: AllCountry-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results.This feature is easiest to explain through an example. Let's say you've heard about a boxing club in Canada called "Capital City Boxing." You try a search for [capital city boxing] to find out more, but it's hard to tell which result is the one you're looking for. Here's a screen shot:None of the results provide any location information in the title or snippet, nor do they have a regional TLD (such as .ca for Canada). The only way to find the result you're looking for is to refine your search ([capital city boxing canada] works) or click through the various links to figure it out. Clicking through the first result reveals that there's apparently another "Capital City Boxing" club in Alabama.Region tags improve search results by providing valuable information about website location right in the green URL line. Continuing our prior example, here's a screen shot of the new region tag (circled in red):As you can see, the fourth result now includes the region name "Canada" after the green URL, so you can immediately tell that this result relates to the boxing club in Canada. With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you're looking for. In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.As a webmaster, you can control how this feature works by adjusting your Geographic Targeting settings. Log in to Webmaster Tools and choose Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. From here you can associate a particular country/region with your site. These settings will determine the name that appears as a region tag. You can learn more about using the Geographic Target tool in a prior blog post and in our Help Center.We currently show region tags only for certain domains such as .com and .net where the location information would otherwise be unclear. We don't show region tags for results on domains like .br for Brazil, because the location is already implied by the green URL line in our default display. In addition, we only display region tags when the region supplied by the site owner is different from the domain where the search was entered. For example, if you do a search from the Singapore Google domain (google.com.sg), we won't show you region tags for all the websites webmasters have targeted to Singapore because we'd end up tagging too many results, and the tag is really most relevant for foreign regions. For the initial release, we anticipate roughly 1% of search results pages will include webpages with a region tag. We hope you'll find this new feature useful, and we welcome your feedback.Written by Piyush Prahladka, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: AllJust a few weeks ago, we made Google Friend Connect a lot easier to use by dramatically simplifying the setup process. Today, we're excited to announce several new features that make it possible for website owners to get to know their users, encourage users to get to know each other, and match their site content (including Google ads) to visitors' interests.To learn more about these new features, check out the Google Social Web Blog.Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Webmaster Level: AllAre the holidays an important season for your website or online business? We think so! And to help make sure you're in good shape, we wanted to invite you to our Holiday Webmaster Webinar.This Webex will be hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They'll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush!Topic: Holiday Webmaster WebinarDate: Friday, November 13, 2009Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)Meeting Number: 574 659 815Meeting Password: webmasterPlease click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.-------------------------------------------------------To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)-------------------------------------------------------1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e56462. Enter your name and email address.3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster4. Click "Join Now".-------------------------------------------------------To join the teleconference only-------------------------------------------------------Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf-------------------------------------------------------For assistance-------------------------------------------------------1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/mc2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support". Written by Lauren Dolmyer, Evan Tang, and Derrick Djang

Webmaster Level: AllYou may have seen our recent announcement of changes to the verification system in Webmaster Tools. One side effect of this change is that blogs hosted on Blogger (that haven't yet been verified) will have to use the meta tag verification method rather than the "one-click" integration from the Blogger dashboard. The "Webmaster Tools" auto-verification link from the Blogger dashboard is no longer working and will soon be removed. We're working to reinstate an automated verification approach for Blogger hosted blogs in the future, but for the time being we wanted you to be aware of the steps required to verify your Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools.Step-By-Step Instructions:In Webmaster Tools1. Click the "Add a site" button on the Webmaster Tools Home page2. Enter your blog's URL (for example, googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) and click the "Continue" button to go to the Manage verification page3. Select the "Meta tag" verification method and copy the meta tag providedIn Blogger4. Go to your blog and sign in5. From the Blogger dashboard click the "Layout" link for the blog you're verifying6. Click the "Edit HTML" link under the "Layout" tab which will allow you to edit the HTML for your blog's template7. Paste the meta tag (copied in step 3) immediately after the element within the template HTML and click the "SAVE TEMPLATE" buttonIn Webmaster Tools8. On the Manage Verification page, confirm that "Meta tag" is selected as the verification method and click the "Verify" buttonYour blog should now be verified. You're ready to start using Webmaster Tools!Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Earlier this year, we launched our very own Webmaster Central channel on YouTube. Just today, we saw our total video views exceed one million! On the road to this milestone, we uploaded 154 videos, for a total of nearly 11 hours of webmaster-focused media. These videos have brought you conference presentations, updates on tools for webmasters, general tips, and of course answers to your "Grab bag" questions for Matt Cutts.To celebrate our one million views, we're sharing a fun video with you in which Matt Cutts shows us what happened when he lost a bet with his team:We're also pleased to announce that we've added captions to all of our videos and plan to do so for our future videos as well. Thank you to everyone who has watched, shared, and commented on our videos. We look forward to the next million views!Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Webmaster level: Intermediate/AdvancedWebmasters who check their incoming links in Webmaster Tools often ask us what they can do when they see low-quality links. Understandably, many site owners are trying to build a good reputation for their sites, and some believe that having poor-quality incoming links can be perceived as "being part of a bad neighbourhood," which over time might harm their site's ranking.If your site receives links that look similarly dodgy, don't be alarmed... read on!While it's true that linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithms, it's just one of many. I know we say it a lot, but having something that people want to look at or use—unique, engaging content, or useful tools and services—is also a huge factor. Other factors can include how a site is structured, whether the words of a user's query appear in the title, how close the words are on the page, and so on. The point is, if you happen to see some low quality sites linking to you, it's important to keep in mind that linking is just one aspect among many of how Google judges your site. If you have a well-structured and regularly maintained site with original, high-quality content, those are the sorts of things that users will see and appreciate.That having said, in an ideal world you could have your cake and eat it too (or rather, you could have a high-quality site and high-quality backlinks). You may also be concerned about users' perception of your site if they come across it via a batch of spammy links. If the number of poor-quality links is manageable, and/or if it looks easy to opt-out or get those links removed from the site that's linking to you, it may be worth it to try to contact the site(s) and ask them to remove their links. Remember that this isn't something that Google can do for you; we index content that we find online, but we don't control that content or who's linking to you.If you run into some uncooperative site owners, however, don't fret for too long. Instead, focus on things that are under your control. Generally, you as a webmaster don't have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other factors that influence indexing and ranking. Organize your content; do a mini-usability study with family or friends. Ask for a site review in your favorite webmaster forums. Use a website testing tool to figure out what gets you the most readers, or the biggest sales. Take inspiration from your favorite sites, or your competitors—what do they do well? What makes you want to keep coming back to their sites, or share them with your friends? What can you learn from them? Time spent on any of these activities is likely to have a larger impact on your site's overall performance than time spent trying to hunt down and remove every last questionable backlink.Finally, keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms. If you want to make sure Google knows about these links and is valuing them appropriately, feel free to bring them to our attention using either our spam report or our paid links report.Posted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin & Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Kirkland

(Cross-posted on the Google Code Blog)This week, we've been celebrating all things mobile across Google. Of course, this wouldn't be complete without a component for mobile web developers! Two months ago we asked you to make the web faster. Now, we've asked the Google Mobile team for some best practices, tips, and resources for mobile web development, and we've come up with a few things we wanted to share. "Go Mobile!" with our Make the mobile web faster article.Posted by Jeremy Weinstein, Google Webmaster

It’s that time again! Tomorrow afternoon I’ll record some new videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every single question, but I’ll tackle several popular questions plus a few interesting questions. Please ask questions that lots [...]

Back in August we mentioned a developer preview of Caffeine, which is new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure. The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that [...]

This year for Halloween I tried to do a see-through hole in your body costume: It worked okay, but not great. The biggest problem was that I didn’t have a gadget lying around the house that could output live composite video. Both my normal video camera and my digital camera had exhausted batteries that wouldn’t recharge, [...]

One of my favorite personal blog posts is about not trapping users’ data. In late 2006, Eric Schmidt declared “We would never trap user data.” Many of the major Google properties (search, Gmail, Calendar) make it trivial to export or download your data. In the past, Google Docs would let you export a single doc at [...]

This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners. We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to [...]

Hey everybody, I just wanted to wish you a Happy Diwali! I hope that everyone has a wonderful festival of lights. It’s a good time today for introspection and reflection on the past year, and for hope for the year to come. Whether you celebrate with firecrackers, sweets, or appreciation for what you [...]

For six weeks during the Fall of 2009 executives from iProspect — in partnership with executives from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft — traveled to 10 cities around the U.S. hosting events for 15-25 search engine marketers in each city.

In this webcast, we will give the audience a chance to ask the experts about paid search advertising. Senior management from iProspect, the Original Search Engine Marketing Firm, will open the floor to questions from attendees on what it takes to compete with the biggest and the best when it comes to paid search.

In this webcast, Chris Sherman explores how to blend offline marketing with online search marketing for maximum effectiveness. He'll discuss strategies and techniques, such as ways to coordinate online and offline campaigns; he'll also explore how to overcome the obstacles that can come up when trying to integrate the online and offline channels in a large organization.

Google has famously stated that all you need to get started with paid search is five minutes and a credit card. While that’s essentially true, to avoid wasting money and to achieve optimal results from your paid search campaign, you need to test, experiment, and test again. Testing and optimization offers multiple benefits: in addition to improving your bottom line, you’ll gain a leg up on the competition, as fully 60% of all search marketers aren’t doing any testing at all, and those that are testing often use simple, ineffective methods, according to JupiterResearch.

In this first-of-its-kind event, senior management from iProspect, the Original Search Engine Marketing Firm, open the floor to questions from attendees on what it takes to compete with the biggest and the best when it comes to search engine optimization. The entire webcast will be devoted to answering questions that registrants submit in advance, and that are submitted live throughout the event. With a focus on extremely large, extremely complex SEO campaigns, senior iProspectors will undoubtedly address topics that include: Simplifying Dynamic Website Optimization, Unique Challenges Posed by Huge Websites, Tracking the ROI of SEO, Integration of SEO and Paid Search, Integration of SEO and Offline Channels.

Discover the extent to which Internet users perform searches after exposure to online display advertising. Learn how to leverage search engine marketing to capture the demand created by display advertising and learn about the existing relationship between the two channels that affords marketers the opportunity to boost the efficacy of both.

Learn the extent to which search marketing efforts are integrated with a variety of offline marketing channels and the specific search marketing and integration techniques in use, as well as how to identify obstacles to the integration process.

By Ben Johnson, Search Marketing Analyst, iProspect

Building on the great feedback we received after the launch of the Yahoo! Video Search music refiners last month, we are launching even more entertainment refiners today. These two new refiners will help you explore your favorite TV shows and movies. You can see that the left rail on our video search results page is becoming [...]

Earlier this year Yahoo! welcomed Yoelle Maarek as our new senior director of Yahoo! Research. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Yoelle was the Director of Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she opened in July 2006. For more than 20 years, Yoelle has been helping dig into search problems. She talks with the Yahoo! Search Blog about [...]

It’s the time of the year to look back on the past 12  months and reflect on events of the year. Here at Yahoo!, we’ve been analyzing billions of queries to find ways to look at the events of this year through the lens of search. Today, the Yahoo! Year in Review returns with a brand [...]

We know that many of you come to Yahoo! Video search to find entertainment-related information. Our video search traffic also shows us that many of those queries have an exploratory intent, including digging for great work from your favorite music artists. Starting today, you can easily dive into albums and songs by your favorite music artist [...]

Music is an integral part of everyday life. Since launching a partnership with Rhapsody in September 2008 and launching the FoxyPlayer last year, music has been an integral part of the Yahoo! Search experience as well. We have found that nearly 6 percent of all Yahoo! searches are music-related. Given the massive number of things people [...]

The Yahoo! Site Explorer team has created some great new features for site owners that provide you with even more information about your site. Experienced Site Explorer users will notice that we now have much more detailed page-level and site-level dashboard information for verified site owners. At the page level, you can now see your SearchMonkey [...]