Today’s search podcast covers Google’s categories of ranking criteria
accidentally exposed?; SEO tools to try; is Google a flop unless all of its
products are winners?; Windows Live Local gets click-to-call and more!
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Below are links to items discussed:
- Hamburg, The Ukraine
Football Team & Seeing The World Cup
- Hamburg Fan Fest &
Germany V. Argentina
- Google’s
Spam Score Details Shown?
Peter Da Vanzo spotted a DigitalPoint thread that found clues as to how Google
scores spam results behind the scenes. Now, honestly, I have no idea if this
is about spam or something else, it is just that the information posted in the
forum, seems to appear like a spam score report by Google. How did it come
about? The user was presented with this information after clicking on a cache
URL in the Google results. The user was shocked to see the following
information revealed to him….
- Report a
Content Violation
KinderStart.com Case May Proceed To Court?
News.com reports that the KinderStart.com case may proceed to court, based on
this past Friday’s hearing. Kinderstart.com initially sued Google for a site
penalty that downgraded the site’s rankings in the Google search results.
Kinderstart.com claims Google violated antitrust laws, "What Google is trying
to do is take out the competition," Kinderstart.com’s lawyer said. The judge
gave KinderStart.com’s lawyers until September 29th to make revisions to the
complaint. The judge said, "You can’t just file a blanket lawsuit and say, ‘We
think we’re going to find some stuff.’" Also see news brief at ComputerWorld….
- SEOMoz’s
Keyword Difficulty Tool
Rand posted an update to a tool named keyword difficulty tool. The tool’s name
is pretty descriptive enough, it tells you how competitive a keyword is to
rank for. There is great detail on how it works here and here….
Interactive Review Of SEOBook’s SEO Firefox Extension
Aaron Wall over at SEO Book released a Firefox extension for SEOs. The Firefox
extension can be viewed here, it allows you to see on the Google and Yahoo
search result pages the PageRank, the age, the links, the .edu links the .gov
links, the del.icio.us numbers and Technorati rank, the Alexa rank a cached
link and much more, right on the page. I decided it would be fun to do an
other video cast. You can view the video cast by reading more….
- Google
Warns U.S. Legislators On Anti-Trust Complaints Over Net Neutrality
The Washington Post reports that Google has warned the United States, that if
telecoms abuse net neutrality principles it backs, through a new law that
might go through, it could consider an anti-trust action. If you want all the
details, check out the Washington Post….
- Yahoo China
To Be Sued For Linking To Sites Selling Pirated Music
Spotted via TechCrunch, Bloomberg reports that Yahoo China is to be sued for
linking to sites that sell pirated music. The article claims "about 90 percent
of all recordings in China are illegal, with sales of pirated music worth about
$400 million annually," according to the International Federation for the
Phonographic Industry. A new law in China that came into effect on July 1 "fines
distributors of illegally copied music, movies and other material over the
Internet as much as 100,000 yuan ($12,500)."…
- Ending
Click Fraud with Pay-Per-Percentage
In Pay-Per-Percentage vs. PPC, Shimon Sandler points out an interesting new
paper from the folks at Microsoft Research – Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions:
An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud (pdf) As Shimon notes, the
idea is that this type of advertising approach would be "immune to both click
fraud and impression fraud," and would use something called "pre-fix match"
instead of broad match….
- Windows
Live Local Integrates ‘Call For Free’ Into All Business Listings
The intrepid Gary Price called my attention to the quiet integration of "click
to call" functionality into Windows Live Local over the weekend. I couldn’t
determine whether this was homegrown or whether Microsoft was working with a
partner such as eStara or Ingenio to offer the service….
Microsoft Running Out Of Room In Redmond
A New York Times article looks into how Microsoft is running out of room in
Redmond. The company is adding 12,000 new employees, which requires them to
expand the headquarters 3.1 million square feet, more than a third of its
current size. They will be adding fourteen new buildings and leases to fit all
these new employees. The problem is, there is not enough room for them to
expand at this pace….
- New York
Times Looks At Google’s Hardware & Infrastructure
A New York Times article has a detailed analysis of Google’s infrastructure
and discussion with Urs Hölzle, senior vice president for operations at
Google. Here are some of the key points I pulled from that article. + Google
tends builds from ground up versus buying. + Google’s computing costs are half
those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional
corporate technology users. + Critics call Google’s philosophy "unnecessary
and inefficient." + "Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by
shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software ? individual
hardware components can fail, but software…
- Google’s
Non Search Products A Flop
BusinessWeek reports that when Google launches a new non-search product, the
competition "shivers," Google has yet to lead in market share for any of those
non-search products. Google’s Gtalk is currently ranked number ten with two
percent market share, Google Finance is the "40th-most-visited finance site,"
and Gmail "is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of
people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail." So with all these product launches, is
Google a threat? Read more at BusinessWeek….
- Google
To Launch Book Search Service In China
The People’s Daily Online reports that Google will be launching an on-line
book search service in China. Google signed agreements with publishing houses,
instead of libraries (as Baidu has), including publishers named Tsinghua
University Press and the Children’s Publishing House. Google said that the
books would be available on-line, "provide search links and grant free access
to a segment of each work, but readers would have to pay to read the full
content." Google plans on taking a 30 percent commission from the profit on
selling books online….
- Yahoo
Launches New Home Page Design In UK & Ireland
Personal Computer World in the UK reports that Yahoo has finally released out
of beta, the new home page redesign that has been in beta since mid-February.
The new design, is visible for all at http://uk.yahoo.com/ and is described
"as the biggest redesign in its history, and promised that the new homepages
would focus on search, content, community and personalisation." Danny confirms
that his Yahoo home page has switched to the beta version, and he is based in
the UK, of course. I am based in New York, and my Yahoo home page has remained
the same….