CEO of Yahoo! Calls for Crazier Advertising

...But when I talk to people about online marketing, they just seem to freeze. I thought this was going to be a much racier industry that wore black and got out there and rock and rolled and I see it being a little shier. I mean, Im the crazy lady.

So does that mean that Yahoo! is going to start walking on the wild side with their advertising? I doubt it. Yahoo! seem to always be one step behind Google in terms of innovation so I suspect this is simply a throw away statement from Bartz to draw attention.

However, Bartz has labelled 2010 the year for acquisitions with the Yahoo! purse strings being loosened. Bartz says:

Last year was looking internally " I hired a new team, restructured the company. This year its about what technologies: Do we need to fill in the blanks, what analytics, what tools?
..whether its acquiring an audience " a group of female bloggers, or whether its acquiring some better analytics tools that help us guide campaigns with our partners, or whether its technology. Last year we bought at company called Zoobut, which is better photo technology, so it let us do very modern photos in our mail. Its that sort of thing " audience, technology and tools.

So, it seems that this year we will hear more from Yahoo! than just updates on their Microsoft merger. Plenty of money spending and crazy advertising " sure sounds exciting!

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SEO Interview with Matt Cutts

I am going to continue to publish the full transcript of interviews in the STC Articles Feed and on the articles page on our site, but I am going to use the related blog posts as a way of highlighting the most interesting points from the interview (for those of you who want the abridged version).

One of the more interesting points was their focus on seeing all the web's content, regardless of whether or not it is duplicate, an unreadable file format, or whatever. The crawling and indexing team wants to see it all. You can control some of how they deal with it, but they still want to see it. Another interesting point was that listing a page in robots.txt does not necessarily save you anything in terms of "crawl budget". (But wait there's more!)

What follows are some of the more interesting statements that Matt made in the interview. I add my own comments to the end of each point.

1. Matt Cutts: "there isn't really any such thing as an indexation cap"
My Comment: Never thought there was one, but it's always good to confirm.

2. Matt Cutts: "the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank"
My Comment: Most experienced SEO professionals know this, but it is a good reminder how the original PageRank defined in the Brin-Page thesis still has a big influence on the world of SEO.

3. Matt Cutts: "you can run into limits on how hard we will crawl your site. If we can only take two pages from a site at any given time, and we are only crawling over a certain period of time, that can then set some sort of upper bound on how many pages we are able to fetch from that host"
My Comment: This will likely be a factor for people on shared (or under-powered) servers.

4. Matt Cutts: "Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We'll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that's why it looks like it has less good content"
My Comment: Confirmation of one of the costs of duplicate content.

5. Matt Cutts: "One idea is that if you have a certain amount of PageRank, we are only willing to crawl so much from that site. But some of those pages might get discarded, which would sort of be a waste"
My Comment: More confirmation

6. Eric Enge: "When you link from one page to a duplicate page, you are squandering some of your PageRank, correct?
Matt Cutts: "It can work out that way"
My Comment: Yes, duplicate content can mess up your PageRank!

7. Matt Cutts: "If you link to three pages that are duplicates, a search engine might be able to realize that those three pages are duplicates and transfer the incoming link juice to those merged pages"
My Comment: So Google does try to pass all the PageRank (and other link signals) to the page it believes to be canonical.

8. Matt Cutts: re: affiliate programs: "Duplicate content can happen. If you are operating something like a co-brand, where the only difference in the pages is a logo, then that's the sort of thing that users look at as essentially the same page. Search engines are typically pretty good about trying to merge those sorts of things together, but other scenarios certainly can cause duplicate content issues"

and

Matt Cutts: re: 301 redirect of affiliate links: "People can do that", but then "we usually would not count those as an endorsement"
My Comment: Google will take links it recognizes as affiliate links and not allow them to pass juice.

9. Matt Cutts: re: link juice loss in the case of a domain change: "I can certainly see how could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay"
My Comment: In a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301.

10. Matt Cutts: No HTTP status code during redirect: "We would index it under the original URL's location"
My Comment: No surprise!

11. Matt Cutts: re use of rel=canonical: "The pages you combine don't have to be complete duplicates, but they really should be conceptual duplicates of the same product, or things that are closely related"
My Comment: Consistent with prior Google communication

12. Matt Cutts: "It's totally fine for a page to link to itself with rel=canonical, and it's also totally fine, at least with Google, to have rel=canonical on every page on your site"
My Comment: Interesting way to protect your site from unintentionally creating dupe pages. Just be careful with how you implement something like this.

13. Matt Cutts: "the crawling and indexing team wants to reserve the ultimate right to determine if the site owner is accidentally shooting themselves in the foot and not listen to the rel=canonical tag"
My Comment: The canonical tag is a "hint" not a "directive"

14. Matt Cutts: re using robots.txt to block crawling of KML files: "Typically, I wouldn't recommend that. The best advice coming from the crawler and indexing team right now is to let Google crawl the pages on a site that you care about, and we will try to de-duplicate them. You can try to fix that in advance with good site architecture or 301s, but if you are trying to block something out from robots.txt, often times we'll still see that URL and keep a reference to it in our index. So it doesn't necessarily save your crawl budget"
My Comment: One of the more important points of the interview: listing a page in robots.txt does NOT necessarily save you crawl budget.

15. Matt Cutts: "most web servers end up doing almost as much work to figure out whether a page has changed or not when you do a HEAD request. In our tests, we found it's actually more efficient to go ahead and do a GET almost all the time, rather than running a HEAD against a particular page. There are some things that we will run a HEAD for. For example, our image crawl may use HEAD requests because images might be much, much larger in content than web pages"
My Comment: Interesting point regarding the image crawler.

16. Matt Cutts: "We still use things like If-Modified-Since, where the web server can tell us if the page has changed or not"

17. Matt Cutts: re faceted navigation: "You could imagine trying rel=canonical on those faceted navigation pages to pull you back to the standard way of going down through faceted navigation"
My Comment: Should conserve PageRank (and other link related signals), but does not help with crawl budget. Net-net: sites with low PageRank cannot afford to implement faceted navigation because the crawler won't crawl all of your pages.

18. Matt Cutts: "If there are a large number of pages that we consider low value, then we might not crawl quite as many pages from that site, but that is independent of rel=canonical"
My Comment: Lots of thin content pages CAN kill you.

19. Eric Enge: "It does sound like there is a remaining downside here, that the crawler is going to spend a lot of it's time on these pages that aren't intended for indexing".
Matt Cutts: " Yes, that's true. You really want to have most of your pages have actual products with lots of text on them."
My Comment: Key point is the emphasis on lots of text. I would tweak that a bit to "lots of unique text".

20. Matt Cutts: "we said that PageRank Sculpting was not the best use of your time because that time could be better spent on getting more links to and creating better content on your site"

21. Matt Cutts: more on PR sculpting: "Site architecture, how you make links and structure appear on a page in a way to get the most people to the products that you want them to see, is really a better way to approach it then trying to do individual sculpting of PageRank on links"
My Comment: Google really does not want you to sculpt your site.

22. Matt Cutts: "You can distribute that PageRank very carefully between related products, and use related links straight to your product pages rather than into your navigation. I think there are ways to do that without necessarily going towards trying to sculpt PageRank"
My Comment: Still the best way to sculpt your site - with your navigation / information architecture.

23. Matt Cutts: on iFrame or JS sculpting: "I am not sure that it would be viewed as a spammy activity, but the original changes to NoFollow to make PageRank Sculpting less effective are at least partly motivated because the search quality people involved wanted to see the same or similar linkage for users as for search engines"
My Comment: An important insight into the crawling and indexing team's mindset. Their view is that they want to see every page on the web, and they will sort it out.

24. Matt Cutts: "I could imagine down the road if iFrames or weird JavaScript got to be so pervasive that it would affect the search quality experience, we might make changes on how PageRank would flow through those types of links"
My Comment: Even though a particular sculpting techniqe may work now, there is no guarantee that it will work in the future.

25. Matt Cutts: "We absolutely do process PDF files" "users don't always like being sent to a PDF. If you can make your content in a Web-Native format, such as pure HTML, that's often a little more useful to users than just a pure PDF file" "There are, however, some situations in which we can actually run OCR on a PDF"
My Comment: Matt declined to indicate if links in a PDF page will pass PageRank. My guess is that they do, but they may not be as effective as HTML links.

26. Matt Cutts: "For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript. I wouldn't say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don't execute JavaScript. Certainly there are some common, well-known JavaScript things like Google Analytics, which you wouldn't even want to execute because you wouldn't want to try to generate phantom visits from Googlebot into your Google Analytics".

and

Matt Cutts: We do have the ability to execute a large fraction of JavaScript when we need or want to. One thing to bear in mind if you are advertising via JavaScript is that you can use NoFollow on JavaScript links"
My Comment: You can expect that their capacity to execute JavaScript will increase over time.
27. Matt Cutts: "we don't want advertisements to affect search engine rankings"
My Comment: Nothing new here. This is a policy that will never change.

28. Matt Cutts: "might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months"

29. Matt Cutts: "We do a lot of stuff to try to detect ads and make sure that they don't unduly affect search engines as we are processing them"
My Comment: Also not new. Google is going to keep investing in this area.

So if you got this far, you must be really interested in Matt's thoughts on search and webspam. Check out the rest of the interview for more!

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]]> searchnewz Daily Wrap-up http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20100312FrequentDesignMistakesinSEO.html Even though Search Engine Optimization has been a discipline for over 10 years, there are still a lot of site designs that make it hard for a search engine to make heads or tails of a website. While you would expect a certain lack of SEO knowledge from less sophisticated users and people who are new to site building, there are still quite a few cases where medium and large companies fail...

Frequent Design Mistakes in SEO

... to consider search engines when creating a web presence.

Here are a few issues we (still) see in the year 2010, which effectively prevent a site from getting proper rankings:

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FourWhere and Google Maps

... this content in a user-friendly way - not only for users of location-based services but non-users as well.

To tackle this problem, Sysomos developed FourWhere, a service that mashes up data and content from Foursquare with the Google Maps API. In a nutshell, FourWhere provides an easy way to find content posted by Foursquare users. For example, if you're looking for a cafe in the heart of Manhattan, FourWhere lets you search using an address to see all the venues and comments for all the places "checked-in" by Foursquare users.

To use FourWhere, visit www.fourwhere.com. Then, type in a city or address in the search box. This will display a map. Right-click on the map to see the different options to see the available venues and comments.

For Sysomos, the launch of FourWhere yesterday is a just a solid step forward. In the future, content analytics will be integrated into FourWhere, as well as content and data from other social media sources.

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Real-Time Results

see how people respond to Google's real-time results. By and large, they don't, as a report stated afterward, "The majority of the participants surveyed were indifferent to the real-time results."

The report then explained, "Only a quarter of the consumers cared for the real-time results compared to 47% of the information foragers."

These results must be a bit disappointing for Google (and perhaps for Bing, too, since it's also getting into real-time search). In addition to whatever work went into developing fresh algorithms, the company may have spent tens of millions of dollars in order to get access to tweets.

It should be interesting to see whether real-time search results remain less than admired, then, or if public perception improves as people get more used to seeing them. Also, we'll have to see how long Google takes to make any adjustments, since at this point, it sounds like the real-time results are hurting the search giant's popularity.

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]]> searchnewz Daily Wrap-up http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20100309FetchasGooglebotMobileandSidewikiPageCreation.html Googles Webmaster Tools team have again been busy working on new enhancements to the Webmaster Center " with 2 new additions to the Lab. Today, the team announced the release of the following into the Webmaster Labs area: Create your Sidewiki page owner entry and Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile. The Webmaster Tools Lab is where the team release...

Die, Humans!

...their improvements and functionality for public testing before releasing them properly into the Webmaster Area.

So what are these 2 new tools?

"Create your Sidewiki page owner entry"

Sidewiki was a web page annotation service that Google launched last year. It allows users to make notes against pages on the web. These notes can also be made public so that other users who are using the Google Searchwiki can see other users thoughts/ideas.

"After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly? With the feature that were introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own."

As a website owner " its important for you to claim your site in Sidewiki. That way " you can at least have your say before every one else comments on your webpages.

Im still a believer that eventually (if not already), Google will use these social web elements to help rank listings in the future. So claiming and optimizing via sidewiki could be a further element in your future SEO plan.

"Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile".

As webmaster or site owner " its important to see how your website is seen from Googlebots point of view. At the end of the day " that determines how your site is going to be indexed.

Now for the mobile savvy webmasters " you can request to see how your mobile site is seen by the Googlebot.

"After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML."

While this wont seem important to many of you now " just think about how many people you know that have smart phones and surf the web on them. When you consider the number of people surfing the web on mobiles " it suddenly becomes far more important.

So pop over to your webmaster account and check out the new features. Let us know what you think and whether you will find them useful.

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]]> searchnewz Daily Wrap-up http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20100308GoogleIntroducesStarsAsBookmarkSubstitutes.html When a site really, really matters to an individual, he or she usually gives it a dedicated space on a toolbar. People can bookmark things with little effort, too, and the human brain is even still used on occasion to store info. But for some reason, Google's decided to provide users with another option, and so now, search results can be starred.

Google Introduces Stars As Bookmark Substitutes

A post on the Official Google Blog recently explained, "With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant."

Need an example? The post continued, "That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for -nfl-."

And although, as hinted at earlier, this may seem redundant, there are perhaps a few situations in which the new stars will come in handy. After all, this will save professionals and students who regularly use different computers from having to worry about importing bookmarks or emailing themselves links; they can just sign into their Google Accounts, instead.

It should be interesting to see if the new stars fare any better than their predecessor, SearchWiki.

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

Search as it exists today proved to be the perfect crystallization of a revenue model, a beautifully simple evolution that had all the right pieces falling into place at just the right time. It was a rare occurrence in the messy and organic online world, one that Google capitalized on to the tune of several billion dollars. But its unrealistic to think that this crystallization of revenue opportunity can survive for long or morph into something equally universal, simple and effective.

Heres what happened: Search solved a fundamental human need " the need to access information. Google did search better than anyone else. All this searching happened in a small handful of places, with Google as the dominant destination. Much of this searching was for information that came from consumer intent.  And, because consumers were searching for information, sponsored messages could be informational in tone rather than overtly promotional. Search was a click, the natural and simple connection of burgeoning need with marketing opportunity.

But here is whats happening: Search is not as simple as it was. Increasingly, our search activity is splintering over more platforms and through more interface layers. Search is going under the hood, powering a number of different apps for a number of different needs. This means the ubiquitous and universal intersection point for search is going away. Were demanding more from search " more functionality, more integration, more understanding of how we intend to use the information we seek. This raising of the bar of our expectations means that it will become increasingly difficult for one interface to serve all those needs.

As we start doing more online, finding the functionality we need to take us not just from point A to B, but allowing us to continue on to C, D and even Z, with digital servants assisting with, or even allowing us to completely ignore, the interim steps, search which just be another piece of that functionality. This usefulness explosion is very unlikely to happen in one place. It will happen in thousands or millions of places. And search will be relegated from being an online destination to an online utility. Google, and Microsoft, and any other search provider, will lose the critical revenue producing high ground, the touch point with the consumer, at least in the form it currently exists. This will require a rapid shift in revenue models, and I suspect its this impending shift that Ballmer was alluding to in his keynote. There will be revenue to be made, far more revenue in fact. But Google and Microsoft may find themselves in the position of taking a much smaller slice of a much larger pie.

Build Your Integrated Search Marketing Team - Part 2

The most basic principle is communication.

4. Ensure Minimum Performance Expectations are Clear " fact is, when youve been working for an organisation for some time its easy to forget that the steps required in performing a deliverable are not as obvious to new team members as they are to you! It is important the team members are aware of what is expected of them so that they are well positioned to deliver. Providing them with tidbits of information rather than clearly painting the full picture may result in unnecessary time wastage, possible confusion and clients receiving service below the expected bar.

5. Never Assume: Communicate " the saying goes, assumption is the mother of all #&*#$! It is safe to say that if your SEM team is not communicating, a number of opportunities are being missed, work is not being delegated properly and inefficiencies hinder team effectiveness. Dont assume, confirm. If in doubt, confirm. Dont think - know. If ever you are unsure of something, be it pertaining to a client deliverable, a relationship with team members or your own work, ask the relevant parties for the required insight or clarification.

6. Communicate With Others as You Wish to be Communicated With " with the dawn of digital technology it appears that two things have been lost " the art of the full sentence and picking up the telephone. One liner answers to emails have their place in certain situations, but providing some clarity and detail around client deliverables may certainly help all team members to get fully on board a given task. The same goes for giving task instructions " the quality of those instructions is often a measure of the number of follow up questions. Rather than getting annoyed at a fellow team member for asking too many questions, use it as a quality benchmark against your instructions. Are you asking someone to perform miracles by holding key facts to yourself " thus wasting their time while they scramble for solutions and answers?

7. Basic Accreditation " ensure that the search marketing team is proficient in the basic fundamentals by providing training in industry recognised certifications offered by the search engines. Even though this type of certification is not always as leading edge as other external training programs, these certifications offer a solid core in the basics " information that the entire team should know. Sometimes, it is valuable to return to the core for a quick refresher, even for those SEM team members who have years of experience because basics can be forgotten too. Not only will this assist in setting the basic benchmark for both minimum required skills and knowledge for the entire team, but it may help streamline processes. Experienced SEM practitioners develop their own style of management " ever been frustrated working on a project in which three different team members apply different settings, management decisions and bidding rules to a PPC campaign? Returning to the basics may assist in cleaning up these types of scenarios.

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]]> searchnewz Daily Wrap-up http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20100303YahooCEODoesntFavorGoogleAntitrustInvestigations.html Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has taken the high road as more and more antitrust regulators start to display an interest in Google's practices. Rather than cheer on the investigations - or instigate new ones - Bartz has stayed mostly neutral on the matter, perhaps even supporting her biggest rival a little.

Bartz Upset Over Google Investigation

Bartz spoke to reporters earlier this week at Yahoo's headquarters, and according to Alexei Oreskovic, she said with respect to both Google's situation and Yahoo's partnership with Microsoft, "I think for the most part the markets work and I'd rather be competitive in the market."

Then here's another interesting comment: in response to Italy's decision to hold Google execs responsible for a video shown on YouTube, Bartz said with regards to Europe, "The countries are kind of weaving their own stories on some of this stuff."

Bartz's remarks probably won't help Google in any material way; regulators won't back off on her say-so or anything like that. Still, considering that Yahoo could probably have caused more problems for Google (remember that Google believes Microsoft is behind several complaints), this is a classy move on its CEO's part.

Google, meanwhile, isn't facing any formal antitrust probes at this time, but a proper skirmish is looking more likely with almost every passing week.