This is probably not a surprising headline for most of us who feel that Google is taking over the world. The Raw Story has the details on how Google has just surpassed IBM as the third largest technology company in the world worth a whopping $145 billion. Compare that to IBM’s $139.5 billion valuation and you can see that they have a good lead on them and are now biting at the heels of Cisco and Microsoft who still holds the #1 spot.
I had a horrible customer service experience with a local body shop earlier this year when I took my son’s 1968 Mustang for repair after a collision. I blogged about it and my post ended up positioning in the top three results at Google, Yahoo and MSN when you searched for their business name. In that post, I used the opportunity to examine their customer service and see what we in the search marketing industry could learn by it.
Yahoo adds another blog to their mix – the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. Why now? Yahoo! Search Marketing has been around since they originally acquired Overture, right? The reason they are just now launching a blog is to coincide with the launch of their new platform. Subscribe to the feed and you will be able to keep abreast with the latest news and developments surrounding their search marketing platform.
Google has released its own Custom Search Engine product which allows users to create their own search engines that reflects their knowledge and interests. What makes this offering different from others such as Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo Search Builder? AdSense! Not only can you create a custom engine that searches the URLs you add to it, you can earn money by running AdSense within the search results.
I came across an article posted at Aviva Directory thanks to Andy Hagans which offers 21 tips on how to launch a blog – successfully. With thousands of blogs launching each and every day, this list provides some basic steps one can take in the first couple weeks of a blog launch. Tips are provided under six main categories – The First Impression, RSS & Subscriptions, Social Bookmarking (aka Going Viral), Getting networked, Link Building and Finishing touches. Following are a few that stand out in my mind.
Yahoo’s much anticipated new pay per click advertising platform named Panama is now live. There were speculations that they would wait until after the holidays but Barry Schwartz who is currently visiting Yahoo Search Marketing headquarters along with other prominent bloggers has reported that Yahoo has officially released the new platform. I was able to get a sneak peak at the new system earlier this year.
Bill Slawski who is an expert at tearing into all the patents search engines file and explaining them in layman’s terms has put together a list of twenty possible ways search engines rerank pages before they deliver them to a searcher. I’ll list the first three below but definitely check the entire article out as it is an interesting read.
I came across an interesting article today at News.com that explores the possibility of parents being sued for their children’s online activity. Well actually it is no longer a possibility but a fact with a recent lawsuit filed in San Antonio, Texas, by an assistant high school principal against two former students and their parents. The suit alleges that defamatory statements were made by the former students on their MySpace.com Web pages.
What is the NOODP tag anyway? It is a meta tag that allows a web site owner to opt out from having the search engines display the Open Directory information in the organic SERPs. The tag was first adopted by MSN and then by Google earlier this year. Many of us have been waiting for Yahoo to follow suit because many times the Open Directory information will be displayed for a site as opposed to the site’s title tag and either a snippet of text from site or meta description tag for the actual description.
Being consistently active on four different forums, I have enjoyed all the benefits mentioned above one time or another. However, the last benefit – marketing yourself, must be done discreetly. In other words, if one is to market themselves in a forum which is comprised of an active community, marketing one’s self should be subtle. In reality the only true way to market yourself effectively is not to market yourself at all but rather to contribute quality to the forum. When you do that, you market yourself naturally.
