Live Search has launched xRank blogger. They “count Live Search web searches” then rank them based on the queries.
According to Live Search, here are the top 5 bloggers:
| 1 |  |
Perez Hilton |
| 2 |  |
Michelle Malkin |
| 3 |  |
Jerry Baker |
| 4 |  |
Hugh Hewitt |
| 5 |  |
Jerry Brown |
Google, Yahoo, and Live have all teamed up to establish a standard for robots.txt. Live says it beautifully,
While most search engines already comply with the REP, this is the first time the three major search engines have come together to detail how we actually implement the protocol. This effort makes it easier for webmasters to know how REP directives will be handled by search providers.
You can read the documentation here.
As many of you know, I’m at SMX: Advanced this week and here’s a quick summary of day 1. I’ll be doing some light live Twittering at: http://twitter.com/drigotti
Keynote - Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, Microsoft:
Kevin focused on how Microsoft is going to tackle some of the verticals - especially consumer search, like product reviews and cashback.
Money For What? Search Marketing Payment Models:
Really interesting from an SEM Company perspective to watch this. Focused on pay based on ad spend and pay per performance, though also noted hourly and pay per project. Heard arguments from all angles and, but like us, most agreed pay based on ad spend was the best route to go for PPC companies. Expect us to start listing our prices and better information on the website soon.
Bot Herding:
Main takeaway was that site owners should “no follow” sites that don’t matter, like privacy policy, TOS, etc so pagerank stays on sites that do matter. Matt Cutts says Google won’t punish for any use of “no follow” and said go ahead, though if you’re doing this you didn’t plan the structure of your website out correctly.
Buying Sites For SEO:
Very insightful and it gave us some new ideas for link building. Buy old sites and expired domains, 301 to main site, collect link love.
Yahoo! announced Tuesday that it’s updating the algorithm. While specifics weren’t mentioned, most speculation is that there will be less reliance on social sites. We’ll see.
Here is the announcement in full:
We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.
To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.
Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma
Yahoo! Search
I’ll be attending SMX Advanced in Seattle this year. Who else is going?
Search Engine Journal has a great post on the updated Yahoo! crawler. The meaty part of the post says:
First, Slurp 3.0 will start crawling from smaller set of IP addresses, although still within crawl.yahoo.net.domain. Reverse DNS checks will still continue working. For webmasters who use IP-based recognition for identifying Yahoo crawlers, Yahoo advises to move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp to avoid getting dropped by the Yahoo Slurp 3.0 crawlers.
Second, Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 will now publish a new user-agent – “Yahoo!Slurp 3.0”. Although existing robots.txt directives for “Slurp” or “Yahoo! Slurp” will continue working, directives for “Slurp 2.0” would not work anymore. So, Yahoo suggests that webmasters use the shorter version of the User-agent which is simply – Slurp.
Effective next week, Yahoo’s quality score will change. Marketing Pilgrim says,
automatic 10¢ minimum bid will be discontinued. Minimum bids will vary rather than be set. Instead higher quality ads will start paying less per click. If your ad is low quality your minimum bid will be higher. So you can’t buy your way to the top, you have to earn it - with clicks and a valuable landing page.
In short, Google has separated search and affiliate marketing and will be selling the search marketing portion to maintain objectivity.
From the blog post:
It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.
Video ads are appearing on select searches accompanied by regular text ads. The video commercials appear to be rotating “Watch commercial,” “Watch demonstration” and “Watch testimonial.” You can see original screen shots to the left for the keyword “smart phone.” Users have also been seeing ads for “laptop,” “phones,” and many other techy keywords.
Video ads still have a long way to go. I don’t think the pricing model has been fully worked out yet, because now, an advertiser pays per view, not per click. Unless the cost/bids are much less on video than actual clicks, I don’t see this going mainstream.
Matter Group LLC, came to Freezing Hot in need of a trustworthy paid search manager on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for its Xeko.com website. We took over the account this fall, and here’s what Mark Gross, Director of Marketing for Matter Group LLC/Xeko.com, had to say about my work:
Dave is a pleasure to work with and adds a great deal of value to the projects he tackles. Our company hired Dave to handle our search-marketing accounts at Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and he’s done a fantastic job. Not only has he taken the task off my plate, he’s greatly improved the quality of the program while reducing costs. He also leveraged his knowledge of the blogoshpere to get our firm some positive buzz on influential blogs–without charging what a PR firm would.
If you’re interested in having Freezing Hot manage your paid search marketing campaigns or utilizing blogs, go get a free, no obligation, quote. It’ll take just a minute and we could actually save your company thousands of dollars a month.
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