From: verticalmeasures.com

Our blog, link building best practices, is usually the place for us to inform our readers about what’s happening in search these days, tips, and information to help your website perform better. That’s why we wanted our readers to be the first to know about our "Boost Your Juice" Contest, giving you a chance to [...]

Read Original: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/boost-your-juice/contest/

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From: google.com

I was just informed by the resident baseball fan that the Mets won a game by a walk. By a walk!

Of course, in a 4 to 3 baseball game, you don’t win by a walk. You win because before the walk, you scored three runs, and you win because before the walk you limited the other side to three runs. The walk was merely the last event.

The last event has huge impact for organizations. When a non-profit fundraiser brings home a million dollar donation, there’s a lot of celebration and the fundraiser (deservedly) gets a lot of credit. But what about the person who started the group thirty years ago? Or the firm that named it or the volunteers that staff it or the heroic work one employee did in Rwanda? What about the CFO who has never missed a quarter in turning in tax returns or the admin who makes that donor feel so welcome every time she stops by?

Marketers take a lot of credit, because marketing is near the end of the game. Part of my mission is to move the work marketers do closer to the beginning of the game. Not because there’s more glory there, but because there’s more leverage. If you build the right thing in the first place, you’re more likely to get a walk at the end.

Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/smYk0nHDJak/won-by-a-walk.html

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From: google.com

Google doesn’t stop at one thing does it? Now, Google AdSense has come up with an interesting maneuver to attract its publishers. It has announced the implementation of image addition at the bottom of the link unit page. Link unit are substitute links showcasing textual advertisement topics relevant to the content on the site. When any of the topic is clicked a standard AdSense page full of ads is pulled out. As shown below

It is exciting new news for those using Adsense Link units, since Google believes that it will generate more revenue for publishers.

Google has also asked the new users to go ahead and try it. Since they do not even take up much space and can help add to your AdSense revenue.

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/b2th0FDrJH0/sn-4-20090601PhotosIncludedinAdSenseLinkUnits.html

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From: google.com

Since yesterday afternoon, people are noticing the little green pixels in their Google Toolbar getting updated. This is because of the Google Toolbar PageRank update and many forums are now talking about it.

We all know that Google shows something and uses another thing. A Google Toolbar Page Rank update is not at all related to changes in your ranking sooner or later. The PageRank scores you will see in the toolbar are outdated and don’t have the slightest impact on rankings. Do not think that PageRank has no influence, but the score your toolbar will show actually does not have any influence.

The last PageRank update was done in April 2009 and it’s just two months since then. Before this, Google updated PageRank value on the New Year’s eve in 2008. Google updates its PageRank value in the Toolbar after a few months. So, the only thing is that the present update is more recent than the ones held in recent past.

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/52CCrCXs86A/sn-4-20090529GoogleUpdatedToolbarPageRankAgain.html

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From: google.com

Breaking news: Ask.com is not going to renew its contract with Looksmart. This step can be a big blow to Looksmart’s revenue. Ask.com listings had generated quite a revenue for Looksmart Publisher solutions, around 89% in Q1 2009 alone.

The partnership which began in 2005 will end in December 2009, with no news of further extension. There had been no announcement or news release from Ask.com in this regard.

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/yBOzLSGug08/sn-4-20090528AskNotRenewingLooksmart.html

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From: google.com

Without any official announcement Google quietly updated its Google News and Google Blog search last week. So as to mark its seventh anniversary Google decided to revamp the look of the website. As seen in Blog search it comes with fresh design and use of new color schemes.

While Google news update was formally announced on Google’s official Blog site, Google blog update was left unannounced. New features include:

• New color frames on homepage
• addition of featured videos and photos
• Youtube logo

The fresh Google news page provides better accessibility to useful information, easy navigation options and finer comprehensibility.

Google Blog on the other hand has become more streamlined. The new layout is very clean, chick and coherent. It comes with new options like

• addition of new blogs
• improved grouping of blog posts
• Faster processing of fresh blogs

The whole experiment is designed to enhance user experience and stimulate better reactions.

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Tag: Google, Updates, SEO





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From: google.com

The Wall Street Journal states that Google has recently started calculating the pay histories, promotion and employee reviews through a mathematical formula for finding out its 20,000 employees, who are most likely to leave the job.

Although, Google officials are reluctant to share information about the formula that is still said to be on testing phase. The inputs of formula include details from surveys and peer reviews. A key complaint amongst most of the employees is being underused and the algorithm has already identified the Google employees with such feeling.

Laszlo Bock, HR Department, Google said, We have not yet seen most important people leaving the job. The formula will definitely be of great help in getting inside employee’s head even before he know that he should leave the company.

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/7IgGZ_vHjcU/sn-4-20090526GoogleAndWhoIsLeaving.html

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From: google.com

From Yahoo1 Dev net today comes Placemaker, a geoparsing Web service that gives you a way to determine the whereness of unstructured content. From Yahoo! This read-only service identifies, disambiguates, and extracts places from structured and unstructured text content, such as web pages, feeds, news, blog posts, and status updates. As an open API, Yahoo! Placemaker helps developers make applications and datasets location-aware. See http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/







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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/3Xkzd0X2H0s/sn-4-20090521YahooIncreasingYourWherenesswithPlacemaker.html

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From: google.com

Nielsen Online







Google

April: 64.0%

March: 64.2%

Change: -0.2



January 2009: 62.8%

Change: +1.2



Yahoo

April: 16.3%

March: 15.8%

Change: +0.5



January 2009: 16.2%

Change: +0.1



MSN

April: 9.9%

March: 10.3%

Change: -0.4



January 2009: 11.2%

Change: -1.3



ASK

April: 2.1%

March: 2.1%

Change: 0.0



January 2009: 1.9%

Change: +0.2



AOL

April: 3.7%

March: 3.7%

Change: 0.0



January 2009: 4.0%

Change: -0.3



Data scoring techniques tend to change over time making past data inaccurate. As always, information here is for entertainment purposes only.



Source: Nielsen Online



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Tag: Search Engine Market Share



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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/MtP5Xs7zOvM/sn-4-20090520April2009SearchEngineMarketShare.html

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From: google.com

...Feral Cats Rejected.



What does a search engine do about photographing the cobbled streets and side alleys of the world. Thats the dilemma that Google faces when trying to add Street View to many city locations in Europe.



The solution? Well, I would have suggested micro-cameras attached to feral cats, but Google went with nerds on tricycles.







I still like my idea better!





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From: google.com

One of the recent reports by Pingdom states that Google made an astonishing profit of $209,624 per employee in 2008. The report also indicated that the profits earned by Google has surpassed many other large tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Intel and IBM.







The report included company names like Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and Yahoo.



Following are some of the companies that earned almost the same profit/employee:


* More than $30k: IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and Dell
* Around $64k: Oracle and Intel
* Around $120k: Adobe and Cisco.



According to the report, Microsoft earned an impressive $194,297 per person, in spite having four times as many employees as Google “ it’s quite an achievement. However, companies like HP and IBM are by far the largest companies listed in terms of their size, but have a relatively low profit margin per employee.



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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/jD46EpqxjDw/sn-4-20090518201KProfitPerEmployeeatGoogle.html

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From: google.com

Calendar.google.com has officially released Google Calendar with new Tasks features.



Here’s a screen preview of Google Calendar:







Just click on the Tasks links on the left side and you’ll notice a widget appear on the right hand side. This widget also shares its content and behavior with the Tasks features available in the Gmail Labs.



To add a new task simply type at a new position within the gadget. Click on the > icon to the right to add more item features. If you want to delete a task just press the backspace button.



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From: google.com

After 18 months on the job, current Ask.com chief executive, Jim Safka, will be leaving the company. The decision to leave was difficult for Jim, and it came about under...

… very unfortunate circumstances. Jims brother recently passed away, causing Jim to re-evaluate his life. Marketing Pilgrim wishes Jim best of luck in his future endeavors.



Jims departure wont be easy for Ask, as they are already far behind competitors in the search engine realm (only a 2.1% market share in March). Jim was originally hired to replace Jim Lanzone as part of the companys shake up back in January 2008.



In an e-mail to the companys staff, InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller acknowledged Jims contributions to the company:


“Jim has demonstrated tremendous leadership during his tenure at IAC, first at Match.com and most recently at Ask.com, where he helped the Ask Network become the 6th largest in the U.S. and created the foundation for a new growth strategy that is showing early positive traction.”



Ask will now be led by Scott Garell who has been promoted to President of Ask Networks. Scott joined Ask back in January 2008 at the same time as Jim.



I think the question we are all asking is, Will this be the final straw that breaks Asks back? Strong leadership is key to Asks survival, and only time will tell if Scott is capable of handling the pressure to turn Ask around.



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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/searchnewzlatestnews/~3/BGJ7Tin6j-c/sn-4-20090514AskcomCEOReadytoPartWays.html

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From: google.com

Posted by Tom_C

Hello hello, today I’m going to talk a little about Google Local. The things I’m talking about aren’t necessarily new or ground-breaking but I think it’s important to expose them to the Moz readership as Local isn’t something that’s talked about all that often on here and there’s quite a few intricacies which you should be aware of when dealing with local optimisation, particularly for clients who have many many locations and who rely on using a bulk upload to Google Local.



Before I go any further, there’s some really really smart people who talk about Google Local optimisation and I’ve been chatting with them recently - I strongly recommend that you check out the further reading at the bottom of this post as they go into a lot more detail about a lot of this stuff than I do (and they probably know more about it than I do too!).

Why do you care about Google Local?

There are two reasons to care about Google Local. The first is unbranded traffic. The second is branded traffic.

1) Unbranded Traffic

Over the past 6 months or so Google has become incredibly aggressive with displaying local results in the main listings. These almost always come in the form of a 10-result one-box (kind of like a 10-box I suppose). It used to be the case that you had to refine your query with a location before you saw any Google Local results such as Hotels in Leeds:

Notice how this 10-box is the very first result that users see - even appearing 3rd or 4th in the 10-box can generate more clicks than a #1 ranking in the organic results just below. That’s pretty staggering. That means that for these super competitive travel queries if you want traffic you need to be optimising for the 10-box before you think about optimising for the regular organic listings.



But wait, trouble is on the horizon because Google is becoming even more aggressive with it’s 10-boxing and it’s starting to display 10-boxes on regular search results without a geographical modifier if Google knows where you’re searching from. Take for example a search for ’IT support’ which generates the following result for me:






Notice that handy 10-box slipping into the results without me specifying my geographical location? Scary huh. So in short, generic competitive queries are generating 10-boxes. If you want to grab that head traffic then you’d best go about some Google Local optimisation pretty quick.

2) Branded Traffic

Ok sure, generic queries are generating 10-boxes, that gives me some potential to aim for but surely my navigational branded search queries are safe right? Right?! Unfortunately not, take a look at this search for “napoleons casino leeds” (one of my old poker haunts) which generates a local listing above the regular organic result:

Well that’s ok right, surely that local result is controlled by me? You would think so wouldn’t you but actually in many cases that’s not true. Keep reading below for examples of when this goes wrong.



So that covers WHY you should care about Google Local - now let’s cover some of the issues.

Issues with Google Local

Here’s a few of the common issues I have come across dealing with Google Local

Spam, and lots of it

I recently did an analysis of the top 10 hotel searches in the US as determined by the Google Search Suggest (I know, pretty unscientific but I wanted a random snap shot):

And then analysed the 10 results in the 10-box for each search result - a total of 100 local results - and found that 15 of them were spammed in one of the following ways:



Spam in the main index:



Take a look at this 10-box from ‘hotels in boston’, can anyone spot the odd one out?






Yeah, of course the last one which is a locksmith rather than a hotel. Easy. The real question is, how many of you spotted the other odd one out? Look at D carefully - you see that the listing appears correctly - it’s for the Club Quarters Hotel which is indeed located in Boston but the URL actually sends you to www.elephantcastle.com (which, incidentally is a chain of bars which has a location in Boston, it’s not the website for the tube station in London).



The reason for this occurrence is that the Elephant & Castle bar and the Club Quarters Hotel have the same address - and Google is trying to merge the listings and doing a pretty poor job of it.



Spam in the details of the Google Local Index:






Take a look at result C - you see that the hotel listing appears correct but the URL is www.cheap-hotels.usa.net. This certainly isn’t a case of merging listings since the www.cheap-hotels-usa.net URL isn’t a genuine site. So why does this spam happen? Well it gets even worse - click through to the details (by clicking on the reviews link) and you see this:






Which is a pretty strange listing - not only is the official website not listed, neither is the cheap-hotels-usa site. Instead it’s now linking to a spam blog on blogspot. Why is this? Well the reason is that there’s an edit button on the listing. And that leads to a free text edit of the Google Local information, including the URL. I’m really not sure why Google allows this free edit - in the past they’ve come out and said that the majority of edits are genuine and that may be true for niche small stores but for the main competitive terms it’s just overrun with spam. Now, there’s a few weeks delay on the data that gets edited here feeding back into the main Google Local index which gets displayed in the 10-box which is why the cheap-hotels-usa URL is still being used in the 10-box.



Here’s the shocking part - if you own a hotel chain and submit a bulk upload to Google Local then this bulk upload isn’t trusted enough to prevent this free text edit function being displayed for your hotel.

Language

So Google Local, which you’d think would be designed to handle local queries, actually sucks really badly at local language searches. The problem is that, as far as I can see, there’s only one Google Local index worldwide compared to all the local indexes you get for google.co.uk, google.fr, google.com etc. This manifests itself in a few ways but the most important one is this - only one language version of a page can be listed in Google Local. So if I search for “madrid hotel” in google.co.uk:

And google.es:






You see that I get a combination of .com (english) and .es (spanish) results. This is handled reasonably well because there’s a leaning towards .es sites in google.es. Cool! But the problem comes when you have two versions of the same content in different languages, whether it’s on a subdomain, subfolder or local TLD it doesn’t matter to Google Local you can only have one listing for one location. So the Hotel Regente in the above example (which has multiple languages on the site) can only ever rank with the spanish homepage, even for searches in the UK, in English. That sucks right? I really wish there was a way to fix this - Google are really good at detecting this in the regular SERPs so it’d be great to roll that language/geotargeting detection into the Google Local indexes as well.

Verification

This is the third issue and it relates to the above issues. If you have a large number of geographical locations (physical stores or hotels for example) then registering them individually can be a real pain. Imagine having to coordinate hundreds of different local verifications all with consistent data and accurate information. But you don’t need to do that right, surely you can just submit a bulk upload? Well you CAN, but as shown above a bulk upload just isn’t that trusted by Google so the only option is to verify them individually which is nigh on impossible if you have many many locations…

Advice

So what’s the point of this post? Well it’s two-fold. Firstly it’s to highlight some of the issues Google Local is facing at the moment so that you can understand better how to optimise your site (or your client’s sities). Secondly it’s to offer a few tips which you can start mulling over and hopefully putting into practice:

1) Don’t rely on a bulk upload unless you have to

Given the ability of webmasters to edit local listings and given the relatively un-trusted nature of the bulk upload - I urge you to try and register individually the locations/properties you want in Google Local.

2) Only create one listing for each individual location

Even if you have multiple language pages or multiple properties at the same location ensure that only one of them is registered with Google Local. At the moment they’re not good at handling businesses with the same address.

3) Think about using KML Geositemaps if you have many locations

If it’s unfeasable to register all of your properties individually (or even, while you’re putting that process in place) then consider using a Geositemap since this should be more trusted than the bulk upload as it relies on the same sitemap file verification process which is intrinsically more trusted than the upload process since it’s tied to your domain.

Further Reading

And last but not least, if you want to know more about Google Local then consult these resources as they cover a lot of the issues I’ve touched upon in a lot more detail!

• Mike Blumenthal’s Blog on everything to do with Google Local
• David Mihm’s 2009 Local Search Ranking Factors
• Matt McGee’s Blog on all things Local
• Martijn Beijk’s blog
  

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Read Original: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/mtdHca-XyW8/google-local-out-of-date-riddled-with-spam-but-absolutely-worth-it

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From: google.com

Posted by randfish

It’s late night Sunday and rather than bringing you exciting news from the world of search and SEO, I’ve got some explaining to do. For those who hadn’t noticed, SEOmoz has some serious downtime and errors this weekend. Starting early morning Saturday and running through to Sunday, many parts of the site were inaccessible due to either A) an exceptionally unlucky set of simultaneous hardware/software failures on our host and backup servers or B) the act of a vengeful Norse god (Odin, we’re looking in your direction).

In any case, this catastrophe was exacerbated due to our recent hosting move - whenever you’re shifting host locations, there’s a certain amount of finger crossing to be done, particularly with relation to data backups. Jeff & Mel did a great job here, but this unlucky strike had a few casualties which couldn’t be recovered.

• Most significant was the loss of the last two weeks of stored data from the Rank Tracker tool. We will again migrate all rankings saved before the Rank Tracker launch, but rankings and settings stored after the launch are not retrievable. We cannot apologize enough for this loss and have taken steps to ensure that this will not happen again.
• The Rank Tracker tool itself is still down while the migration completes, but should be back up in the next 24 hours. When the service returns, you will find significantly increased limits for manual rankings run per day and for automated rankings as well.
• A smaller data loss may be noted for saved Linkscape advanced reports. Some reports run in the last day or so may not have been saved. We have added 5 Linkscape credits to all accounts to accommodate this.
• Blog posts, user profiles, Q+A questions, marketplace profiles and any other database-reliant content created between Saturday afternoon (when the site briefly recovered) and Sunday midday (when our last round of failures/attacks occurred) is irreperably lost. Again, we’re taking steps to ensure that backups will be secure and solid for the future, hopefully making this a one-time only event.
• Other fragments of data, including some Q+A questions, blog post & YOUmoz images, profile pictures and other database elements from the past 2 weeks may also have suffered. We’ve recovered nearly everything (and possibly got all of them), but if you notice some oddities, this is most likely why.

For PRO members, we’re doing our best to make up this weekend’s events to you with greater access to those tools hit hardest. We’ll also work tirelessly this week (despite the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle) both to prevent future mishaps like this and to provide a high level of support for anything you need.

To our readers, visitors and regulars - I offer my personal apology. I know that you like to read and use SEOmoz on the weekends, and I’m sure this interfered with your regular course of business. We’ve got a great team of developers here at SEOmoz, and I’m incredibly proud of their performance under fire over the last 48 hours. Rest assured that all of us will put our shoulders to the wheel to make data integrity and uptime priorities over the weeks and months to come.

Thanks for your patience and understanding,

Rand Fishkin, CEO

p.s. Our thanks also to ex-mozzer Jane Copland, whose quick eye and catlike reflexes over IM brought the site issues to the attention of our dev team very early on and probably saved us additional heartache.

p.p.s. A few other areas are affected - Labs, Q+A Search & our RSS feed. We’re working to get these back online today as well. If you find anything else, please post in the comments; we appreciate all the help!

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