Search Engine News

At this year’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Boston, I had the opportunity to talk to Matt Cutts from Google a few times and when I posted my recollection of comments about Google and user or toolbar data for rankings he wanted to clarify. That presented an opportunity for a mini interview about Google’s position on [...]

As a search marketer that’s been providing search marketing services for quite a while, I like to think of Andrew Goodman as the guy who “wrote the book” on Google AdWords - or at least that’s one of the ways I like to think of him. He’s authored/edited Traffick.com since long before blogs became popular, [...]

Since the acquisition by Google of Urchin earlier this year, pricing has been $199/mo and now Google has decided to change Urchin over to Google Analytics and offer it for free!
The free version is limited to 5 million pageviews a month but the limit is is removed if you’re also an active AdWords [...]

While listening to a WebmasterRadio.fm podcast with Detlev Johnson and Todd Freisen recently, I noticed a comment Detlev made about bringing back the I-Search discussion thread he moderated several years back. I-Search was a tremendous resource for information on search engine optimization and marketing for years. I contacted Detlev to see if this was indeed [...]

Our good friend, and fellow contributor Aaron Wall has been dragged into a lawsuit with the notorious Traffic Power (now known as 1p). The case itself has turned into a potential precedent for bloggers everywhere and potential liability for their postings. While traffic power has a fairly abysmal reputation [...]

The Yahoo publisher network is rumored
to be live this week to exclusive bloggers. There’s been plenty of buzz about
the YPN for
giving content
developers an option of what to choose as a contextual ad network of choice.
Plenty of scuttlebutt around forums
about the new Y program
that has been discussed plenty of times previously. Sign up a few [...]

Ask Jeeves, the number four web search property according to most accounts, will be launching a PPC service August 15th. SponsoredListings.ask.com sports a “coming soon” page that should have more information soon. This will provide a nice paid search option to Adwords, Yahoo search marketing, and MSN’s impending PPC program.
Find out more about [...]

There’s been some interesting news lately about Google and their plans for the real estate market online. The internet has been a natural breeding ground for real estate with online adspend approaching $1.8 billion according to MarketingVox.
Leads, clicks, and all things online real estate generally fetch a pretty penny which is just the type [...]

Google AdWords loses some of it’s complexity. Google is dropping the 5 various ad delivery states in favor of having ads be active or inactive. Lower relevancy ads may still run by paying a premium for not being relevant, while some higher relevancy ads get a deeper discount for their relevancy.

Yahoo! and Google recently enhanced their personalized search services.

Google announced today the start of Google Sitemaps, a program for more effecient spidering of websites.
From their about page:
Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By [...]

During the Google Factory tour yesterday Marissa Mayer described an option to personalize the Google home page. A Google blog post suggests the new portal looking, customization feature was developed as a way to assembled the various features of Google in one place: Gmail, news, weather, etc.
This initial version offers links to various Google services [...]

Barry at Search Engine Roundtable has been running a search engine relevancy challenge through a new search site he’s set up called RustySearch. Search results come anonymously from the major search engines and you can rate each on relevancy. Over 5,000 searches have been rated so far. Here’s the official results page. You might be [...]

IAC/InterActiveCorp and Ask Jeeves are not officially commenting yet, but plenty of media and blogs are in regard to a $2 billion stock deal for IAC to acquire Ask Jeeves.
IAC/InterActiveCorp which owns Web properties such as: Expedia, CitySearch, Ticketmaster, eVite and Match.com will bring significant resources to Ask Jeeves’ efforts to increase its share of the [...]