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Oct 7, 2008 at 11:59am Eastern by Mike Blumenthal Small Business Alert: Claim Your Google Local Business Listing Before Someone Else Does! Imagine going to the Post Office to check your post office box to discover that all of your mail and receipts for the past few weeks had been forwarded to an unknown party. The Post Office informed you that there was no chance of getting your receipts back and if you wanted to start receiving your mail at your PO box once again, you needed to go over to their new business center and fill out some forms to claim your box. Just notifying the Post Office that it was your box was not enough to protect it in the future. Due to normal delays in processing it would be 2 weeks before you started receiving your mail and money again. If you're a small business with a local listing in one of the major search engines, you need to beware: the same scenario described above could happen to your local search result info if you're not careful. The apparent hijacking of a large number of independent florists in Google Maps several weeks back is just such a story. Google, in the role of Post Office, allowed someone to hijack listings in the Florist industry using the community edit feature. For those of you unfamiliar with the incident here is a brief recap. The technique, apparently in widespread use in the locksmith, pay day loan and other industries, exploited weaknesses in Google's Community Edit capability. In this newly reported case in the floral industry, affiliate mapspamers targeted high ranking florists in major markets that had not claimed their business listings in the Local Business Center so as to be able to benefit from an existing businessâ ranking and reviews. The spammers, using these community edit tools, would change the phone number to another local number, change the location of the business slightly and then proceed to add a category, a new URL and ultimately the change name of the business. Apparently the smal

Oct 8, 2008 at 5:55pm Eastern by Matt McGee Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Yahoo has announced that they'll begin to roll out Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on a limited basis beginning this week. According to Jitendra Kavathekar, Yahoo's Web Analytics VP, the service has already been made available to select Yahoo advertisers and third-party application developers. The next "big deployment," Kavathekar says, will be for Yahoo's 13,000 e-commerce customers hosting under the Yahoo Small Business service. Beyond that, Yahoo Web Analytics will continue to roll out for the rest of this year and into 2009. Yahoo's analytics service is a result of the company's purchase of IndexTools earlier this year. Shortly after the purchase, Yahoo's Dennis Mortensen announced the company's plans to make Yahoo Web Analytics free. In its FAQ about the new analytics service, Yahoo suggests three reasons why its product is better than the competition: 1. Real-time Data: "While some analytics products provide data 24-48 hours after collection, Yahoo! Web Analytics reflects data within minutes of collection." 2. Raw Data: "While some products store aggregated data, which restricts the usefulness of the data to pre-created or canned reports, Yahoo! Web Analytics stores data in non-aggregated raw form." 3. Ease-of-Use and Flexibility Yahoo offers a sign-up form for future updates on the Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) home page. Update: Yahoo's Dennis Mortensen explains more and shares screenshots in a new post on VisualRevenue.

Oct 8, 2008 at 8:28am Eastern by Greg Sterling Online Ad Revenues Up Vs. 2007, Down Vs. Q2; Search A Relative Bright Spot Overall online ad spending in the US was up almost 13 percent compared with Q2 2007, but down slightly (0.3 percent) from Q1 2008. Online ad revenues for the second quarter were $5.7 billion, compared with $5.8 billion in Q1. Revenues were $11.5 billion for the first six months of 2008 vs. approximately $10 billion during the same period in 2007, according to the IAB. Search took a bigger share (44 percent) of the pie than it did in the first half of 2007 (41 percent). Otherwise the first six months of 2008 look quite similar in most respects to the first half of 2007. The question now is: how will a souring economy impact Q3 and Q4? Here are some IAB graphics reflecting the spending trends: Most ad categories are flat or differ by a percentage point, except for Search and Classifieds (which includes yellow pages/directories). Those two saw gains and losses of three points respectively. The concentration of ad spending among the top online players remained consistent with 2007 in terms of percentage distribution. Among the top spending industry categories, retail and financial services were down slightly in the first half vs. last year: Expect those numbers to decline further in the second half, as weakness in both sectors gets (perhaps much) worse before things improve. Overall, performance based advertising saw gains of 2 percentage points, while CPM pricing saw an equivalent decline in the second quarter vs. a year ago. I would also expect this trend to continue in the second half as advertisers look to the greater "accountability" of performance-based pricing from their online ad buying. This will continue to benefit search in a relative sense, but no one will likely be spared the effects of the recession.

Oct 14, 2008 at 2:19pm Eastern by Greg Sterling YouTube Now Featuring "Promoted Videos" Perhaps the "third leg" of the new YouTube monetization tool, the site has introduced "promoted videos." These ads are to YouTube video search results as Google paid search is to organic listings. AdAdge wrote about the new ads yesterday. This new ad unit joins "click to buy" and ads on full-length shows, which were also introduced within the past week. Here's an example of the promoted videos (right column) on a search results page on YouTube: In this case the search was "puppies" and only one of the ads is relevant. This is likely a function of a limited number advertisers at this point. Because promoted videos are fairly unobtrusive and consistent with the appearance of YouTube search results, they don't impinge on the user experience. And while they could be quite effective for Google, the challenge will be to get enough coverage so that they're relevant to queries and users click on them accordingly.

Oct 3, 2008 at 5:37pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan Banner Ads & Image Ads On Google Images Google Images & Banner Ads Closeup Earlier this week, we noted a report that Google was showing banner ads on Google Images. Now via TechCrunch, a new implementation - an AdWords ad on Google Images with its own thumbnail image. Notice in the screenshot above how a Guinness Logo is appearing next to a Target ad where NHL Buffalo merchandise is being sold on a search for buffalo logos. While a Guiness logo is being used as part of the ad isn't clear. Here's the ad in context: Google Images & Banner Ads While showing an image next to ad is a big step for Google, it's not that far removed from video they've tested with some ads. But an actual banner ad that they've tested with some ads. But an actual banner ad that SearchViews spotted on Google Images is another thing entirely: Google Image SERPs with banner ad See it down at the bottom of the page? An actual banner ad. We're checking with Google for more details. Postscript: Google sent this: As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation and to help users find new and better ways of getting the information they're looking for, we are currently conducting a test to show ads on the results pages for Google Image Search. The experiment is restricted to U.S. advertisers who are using formats including text ads and static image ads. Display Ads Coming In Image Search from us back in May has more details on how Google said this type of test would be coming. There's also some discussion now developing on Techmeme.

Oct 9, 2008 at 4:15pm Eastern by Matt McGee Google Puts New AdSense Ads Under Maps Adsense Ads on Google Maps The continued success of Google Maps gives Google another growing revenue stream to tap into, and that's what they're doing with the placement of new AdSense ads immediately under maps on Google Maps. The ads don't show up on all searches, but they do appear on enough searches to suggest this is more than a limited test. Amit Agarwal is seeing these ads in India, for example. Dave Shaw, who first alerted us via email, is seeing it in the UK. The screenshot above shows how the new ad placement looks on a search in Google Maps for [seattle real estate]. Moving out of a major city into a much smaller city suggests that Google needs to improve its targeting on these ads. A search for [west richland real estate] reveals an ad for a company in Richland, PA. (West Richland is a small city in Washington state.) Adsense Ads on Google Maps Unlike the regular Local Business Ads that show up to the left of the map, which take you to the map "popup" for that advertiser, clicking on the ads below the map take you straight to the advertiser's website. There's more coverage of this on Techmeme.

Oct 9, 2008 at 3:00pm Eastern by Matt McGee Google Starts To Classify Content Types In Web Search Google Snippets Like other search engines, Google already distinguishes between various types of content. You can search specifically for images, videos, books, blog posts, and so forth. Google has separate search engines for each. But two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that's gathered from ordinary web pages. Search Engine Roundtable points to a discussion on WebmasterWorld about the addition of dates at the beginning of some search results - something Michael Gray spotted in mid-September. From my personal experience, this seems to be happening mostly on content that Google can identify as blog posts and news articles - but not exclusively on those types of content. And speaking of identifying types of content, Google Operating System points out that Google is starting to show special forum-related information in search results when it can identify that the result comes from a message board. Author Alex Chitu suggests this could mean new advanced search options in the future: This new feature shows that Google is able to automatically classify web pages and to extract relevant information. Once Google starts to show data for other kinds of web pages, we can expect to see an option to restrict the search results to a certain category (forums, reviews, blogs, news articles). The screenshot above has examples of both cases, the top showing dates in the snippets, and the bottom showing forum information.

Oct 8, 2008 at 3:02pm Eastern by Matt McGee Google Confirms RSS For Web Search Results Google has confirmed for Search Engine Land that they'll soon start offering RSS feeds for web search results. When it happens, the RSS feeds will be an extension of Google Alerts, which currently only allow notification by email. The addition of RSS alerts was first picked up by Amit Agarwal, who found it mentioned in an October 1st Wall Street Journal article where author Katherine Boehret wrote, "In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails." In an email today, a Google spokesperson told us: "While I can't be more specific about an ETA, I can confirm the launch." Google Alerts offers email-only notifications on results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups. Google is currently the only major search engine not offering RSS feeds of web search results.

Oct 3, 2008 at 9:48am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Removes Directory Links From Webmaster Guidelines Brian Ussery reported that Google has dropped two important bullet points from the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Those bullet points include: * Have other relevant sites link to yours. * Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites. At the same time, Google Blogoscoped reported that Google removed the dictionary link in the search results, at the top right of the results page. Related, I am not sure. I speculated that maybe Google is going to go after more directories in the future. By removing those two bullet points, maybe Google can do this - without seeming all that hypocritical. In addition, I noted a comment from Google John Mueller at a Google Groups thread where he explained the logic behind removing those two points: I wouldn't necessarily assume that we're devaluing Yahoo's links, I just think it's not one of the things we really need to recommend. If people think that a directory is going to bring them lots of visitors (I had a visitor from the DMOZ once), then it's obviously fine to get listed there. It's not something that people have to do though :-). As you can imagine, this is causing a bit of a commotion in some of the forums. Some are worried, some are mad, and some are confused by the change.

Oct 6, 2008 at 8:06am Eastern by Barry Schwartz SEOmoz Crawls Web To Expand SEO Toolset Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz announced they have been working for about a year on building out an index of the web, in order to be able to provide SEOs and SEMs with a toolset they have never had before. SEOmoz has crawled and built a 30 billion page index of the web. Rand explains this index is still growing and is refreshed monthly. The purpose, "to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape." Part of the indexing was to build out a new tool named Linkscape. Linkscape gives SEOs "online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value," said Rand. I hope to play with it more after the SMX East conference, but with a quick trial, it seems pretty comprehensive. SEOmoz also launched a new design and has given PRO members more options and features. To read all about these features and the tools, see Rand's post.

Oct 13, 2008 at 5:28pm Eastern by Vanessa Fox Google Webmaster Tools Now Provide Source Data For Broken Links Ever since Google Webmaster Tools started reporting on broken links to a site, webmasters have been asking for the sources of those links. Today, Google has delivered. From Webmaster Tools you can now see the page that each broken link is coming from. This information should be of great help for webmasters in ensuring the visitors find their sites and that their links are properly credited. The value of the 404 error report Why does Google report broken links in the first place? As Googlebot crawls the web, it stores a list of all the links it finds. It then uses that list for a couple of things: * As the source list to crawl more pages on the web * To help calculate PageRank If your site has a page with the URL www.example.com/mypage.html and someone links to it using the URL www.example.com/mpage.html, then a few things can happen: * Visitors who click on that link arrive at the 404 page for your site and aren't able to get to the content they were looking for * Googlebot follows that link and instead of finding a valid page of your site to crawl, receives a 404 page * Google can't use that link to give a specific page on your site link credit (because it has no page to credit) Clearly, knowing about broken links to your site is valuable. The best solution in these situations generally is to implement a 301 redirect from the incorrect URL to the one. If you see a 404 error for www.example.com/mpage.html, then you can be pretty sure they meant to link to www.example.com/mypage.html. By implementing the redirect, visitors who click the link find the right content, Googlebot finds the content, and mypage.html gets credit for the link. In addition, you can scan your site to see if any of the broken links are internal, and fix them. But finding broken links on your site can be tedious (although it's valuable to run a broken l

Oct 7, 2008 at 8:11am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Webmaster Central Hosting "Link Week" This week at the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google has a series of blog posts all about links. The first two blog posts are live and are named: * Links information straight from the source * Importance of link architecture Google explains that they will be writing about three main topics this week. (1) Internal links, the links that you have within your site. That post is already live and is about the how you should structure your link structure for best search engine visibility. (2) Outbound links or the links you post on your pages to other sites. I assume Google will discuss the value of these links and who you should and should not link to. Clearly, think about your user here and not the search engine. (3) Inbound links or the external sites that are linking to your site. I assume Google left this for last, because this may be the most interesting topic. Google plans to bust some myths, so it will be interesting to see what they say on the topic of links hurting your site. Time will tell - but stay tuned for more information. Postscript: Here is Google's post on linking outbound, which has useful tips for beginners on who and when to link out. In addition, it tells you how to handle user generated content links. Postscript 2: I was a bit let down by Google's inbound link post.

On the Live Search blog, Nathan Buggia recaps his SMX East presentation on Webmaster Guidelines, shares the slides from his talk, and expands on topics such as paid links, cloaking, and website penalties. He shares some detail on how Live Search handles paid links: Essentially we look at each link individually to understand the degree to which the site is really endorsing the link. So, while we most likely will not ban your site for buying or selling a few links, it is also likely that they may not actually end up providing any value either.

Oct 13, 2008 at 9:53am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Now Working With Click Forensics Google allies with click-fraud-detection firm Click Forensics from ComputerWorld reports Google has now agreed to work with Click Forensics to aid in the detection and reporting of search ad click fraud. Specifically, Google said they would now accept click fraud submissions through the product, FACTr. FACTr is a product Click Forensics created with the help of Yahoo to gather and submit click-quality reports. Google will now be accepting these reports electronically, hopefully streamlining the process for advertisers to get refunds for approved click fraud. Looksmart and Miva are also now accepting them, along with Google, in news that Click Forensics announced last week. As you may remember, Google and Click Forensics have not always seen eye-to-eye. But this is a nice step to see from both parties involved. As a matter of history, Yahoo partnered with Click Forensics back in March of this year.

Conclusions * Local business owners seem to be confused about what actually constitutes spam, but can you blame them? The world of the Local search engines is often confusing even to those of us who study them on a daily basis! * Google's creation of a public forum for reporting anomalies in Maps has helped a lot of businesses recover traffic lost via Maps, and has probably helped Google identify weaknesses in its own algorithm as well. The responsiveness of the Maps team has been relatively admirable, even without providing verbal confirmation in the thread that changes have been made. (Of course, business owners whose situation hasn't been addressed are irate over the lack of response...) * The on-again/off-again bulk upload feature of Google Maps seems to be a particular favorite tool of mapspammers. * Local business owners: claim your listing at Google to avoid being victimized by hijackers and to decrease the likelihood of conflation with someone else's listing. If you don't have a website, direct your Local Business Listing at Google to one of your listings featuring the same information on another portal, such as Yahoo, Citysearch, or Yelp. * The large percentage of reported record conflations also underlines the importance of giving Google a strong signal of your business information (i.e. spiderable HTML address and phone number) on your own website. The more closely Google can associate that particular information with your business, the lower the chance of identifying someone else's business with the same information. In all honesty, I was surprised that the total number of bona-fide instances of spam reported in two months was so low, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's possible that the quality of Local results has improved dramatically since the advent of the 10-pack in January. However, more likely is that the typical local business owner doesn't know where to report possible spam. It'll be interesting to see whether