Posted by DazzlinDonna on April 2nd, 2008 in Search Engine News
I’m extremely pleased to see that Google will be selling off the SEO portion of Performics. They’ve split the company up (that they acquired in the DoubleClick deal) into two parts - affiliate and search marketing. The search marketing division will be sold, and that’s exactly what we all hoped would happen. That whole “conflict of interest” thing was just way too much, and it really needed to be taken care of. Good to see them address it so quickly.
They haven’t sold it yet, but they have received “interest” from some of their partners, and I’m sure that now that…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on January 12th, 2008 in Search Engine News
There’s a new awards site that hands out awards for the best search marketing post / article. It’s been dubbed the SEMMYs, and it’s a great collection of some outstanding posts. I noticed that SEO Scoop has been nominated in the Social Media category for my Using Social Profile Pages To Your Advantage post. Very cool. Apparently, these long nominations lists are going to be reduced down in size to a much smaller pool before voting begins, so I’m not sure if I’ll make the final cut or not, but it’s very cool to be included in this round at least.
I love…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on December 17th, 2007 in Search Engine News
What’s on your search wish list this holiday season? Is there something you want from Santa Baby? (er, Santa Google or Santa Yahoo or … you get the idea). To celebrate the holiday season and the coming new year, it’s contest time! And of course, the prizes are on everyone’s wish list all the time, but we’ll get to the prizes momentarily. (No peeking).
First, what do you have to do to win the 2007 Holiday Wish List / 2008 Predictions List contest? It’s simple. Just comment on this post! Include at least one item to be placed on the Search Wish…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on December 13th, 2007 in Search Engine News
John Battelle has listed an exhaustive list of questions that a House Representative is asking Google to answer. This representative is “the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has Internet regulation as one of its responsibilities.” I won’t list all of the questions (see Mr. Battelle’s post for that), but here’s an example (after asking a bunch of privacy-related questions about the data Google obtains:
2. Please explain how Google uses the information or data described in Question 1(a) - (l), including, but not limited to, the following uses: perfecting Google’s search algorithm; operating Google’s advertising programs such…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on December 4th, 2007 in Search Engine News
About 3 weeks ago, I said it was Past Time For MSN To Pony Up To The Real Truth About Referrer Spam. Now, they have.
Since that time, I’ve had the opportunity to discuss some of these issues with Jeremiah Andrick, the Program Manager of Live Search Developer Tools. He and the team of Live engineers* have addressed these issues and have issued a statement, answered questions, explained what it is all about (hint: they are checking for cloaking), and noted what they’ve done to solve the problems created by their new spambot. They’ve also created ways for you to address…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on December 2nd, 2007 in Search Engine News
Kudos to Michael for prompting Matt Cutts to agree that it is time to remove the requirement that one must admit to guilt, even if one believes he is innocent, before one is able to request reconsideration for dropping a Google penalty. Matt says:
Michael VanDeMar, just to give you a quick update, I dropped an email to someone at Google to request that we remove the text “I believe this site has violated Google’s quality guidelines in the past.â€? from the checkbox in the reconsideration request form, and I requested some other modifications to the language of the form as…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on November 26th, 2007 in Search Engine News
I’m not quite sure why metasearch engines aren’t more popular than they are. They are actually pretty darn useful much of the time, but they languish far down the list of popular search engines. Still, I don’t think it hurts to take a fresh look at them now and then, so today’s post is all about the metasearch engine.
First, let’s make sure everyone is clear on what a metasearch engine is. It is not a search engine that ranks sites based on meta tags. It is a search engine that grabs results from a multitude of search engines (and/or directories), and returns…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on November 17th, 2007 in Search Engine News
About a month ago I told you I would be using Sproose for a month, and I would let you know more of my thoughts after using it for a while. Now’s that time. So, how is Sproose as a search engine? It’s…ok. Not bad. Maybe even…good.
The biggest issue I’ve had with it is the occasional slowdown or page not loading. However, I use satellite to connect to the Internet, so I am never 100% sure if it’s a site that’s slow, or if it’s my connection that’s bad.
I still like the social voting concept, although I didn’t use that aspect…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on November 14th, 2007 in Search Engine News
I was invited a while back to be a part of the testing of the new natural language search engine, Powerset. For a while now, I’ve had high hopes that this might be THE killer search engine we’ve all been waiting for. It might be…but at this point, it’s very difficult for me to know.
I’ve only played with a few of the the demo sets that they have available in the lab. I won’t go into details because frankly, I’m not sure what details I’m allowed to share. But I assume I’m safe to give general impressions.
It’s interesting. The concept…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on October 27th, 2007 in Search Engine News
How much trust can you place in the algo of a company that gives a PR3 to Youtube, for crying out loud? Let’s see. Either…
- Google mucked up the entire PR thing, and the whole thing has been just a huge mistake on their part, with nothing being intentional.
- Google really did purposely punish some sites and somehow their finger slipped and they also punished THEIR OWN SITE, giving Youtube a PR3.
- Some combination of the above
I’m really starting to wonder about the geniuses they hire.
Posted by DazzlinDonna on October 24th, 2007 in Search Engine News
Looks like the toolbar PR updated today, with many sites losing lots of green. Problogger alerted me to it, since it noted that its PR went down to a 4, as did Copyblogger’s. Some of my sites saw a lower PR, including this one. However, I’ve still got great rankings and traffic for things I track, so there’s no direct reflection there. If PageRank falls, but rankings and traffic stay the same, does anyone hear it drop?
I don’t really pay attention to other sites’ PageRank, so it’s hard for me to tell who droppped and who didn’t, so if you know…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on October 22nd, 2007 in Search Engine News
- Has the time come for Digg-style social voting search engines?
- Can a search engine present algo-based results that can then be further influenced by user votes?
- Are users comfortable enough with the concept of voting at this point to be able to marry digg-style voting with normal search?
- And if socially-influenced SERPs become a reality, will we attempt to game it and subsequently ruin it?
- If a new search engine can successfully accomplish such a goal, will users switch to it?
Let’s attempt to answer each of those questions. First, let’s take questions 1 and 2 together.
Has the time come for Digg-style social voting search…
Posted by DazzlinDonna on October 20th, 2007 in Search Engine News
Yesterday my Yahoo search error 999 problem was solved when I obtained a static IP address from Hughesnet (my new satellite internet service provider). Apparently, the dynamic IP I was getting was being blocked by Yahoo. Anyway, to test things out and make sure I could use Yahoo search again without error, I attempted to think of a search term to enter. That’s actually hard to do when you don’t really need to search for anything. So rather than strain my brain, I searched for [dazzlindonna].
Now, we all know that Yahoo enhanced their search page lately, and the Search Assist…
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