HP Computers to be Distributed with Live Search Toolbar

Here’s a note for all those people who think Google is unbeatable in the search engine “wars”, Microsoft has signed a deal to distribute a customizable Live search toolbar on every HP computer starting in January 2009. The default search will also be set to Live, much like Firefox’s default search is set to Google.

“This agreement with HP is a strategic indicator of our increased focus on securing broad-scale distribution for Live Search,” said Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft. “This is the most significant distribution deal for Live Search that Microsoft has ever done, and we are very pleased to be partnering with HP to help bring Live Search to millions of consumers across North America.”

Microsoft is building a custom, Live Search-enabled toolbar for HP customers that take advantage of the exceptional user experience capabilities of Microsoft Silverlight. The toolbar will provide HP with customization capabilities within the buttons on the toolbar, providing quick and easy access to a variety of online services and tools, such as Snapfish by HP, the company’s online photo service, and HP customer support.

“This agreement provides HP customers with an outstanding search product in Live Search, as well as a user-friendly, fully customizable way to access their favorite online services,” said Ulf Claesson, vice president of Worldwide Attach at HP. “Microsoft shares HP’s passion for delivering world-class technology to consumers in meaningful ways, and today’s announcement will help to provide an even more personal computing experience for HP customers.” Source: Microsoft Live Search Toolbar to Be Distributed on 2009 HP Consumer PCs

With HP commanding about 20% of computer sales, this is one huge deal for Microsoft, if they can knock down deals with the other four top computer manufacturers, they could make a HUGE dent in Google’s dominance, Dell may be a hard one to get, but surely they can land a deal with Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba, especially if they are offering them 4 bucks an install like they are currently in their affiliate program, check it out here. May as well combine it with Windows Live Onecare and get virus and spyware scanning, firewalls, tune-ups, file backups as well as better protection against phishing scams and viruses adding the toolbar.

Add this to the little cash back experiment they are doing and they could lure some new visitors with new pc purchases and keep them there with the cash back offering. Why not, if you can save more money by purchasing your HP computer from the same place but get extra back because you are using Live search, you’ll definitely end up with some new users.

Check out the HP computers listing on one of our other sites and are always updated listing of great computer deals.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google, HP Computers, Search Engines, Windows Live No Comments » June 2008

Webmaster Stuff

Best SES Session - Are Paid Links Evil? We’re only half-way through SES San Jose but I think we’ve already seen the best panel discussion of the event.

“Are Paid Links Evil” saw Matt Cutts go head to head with Greg Boser, Michael Gray, Todd Malicoat, Todd Friesen and Andy Baio.

The room was packed with marketers all hoping the session would live up to the hype of its carefully crafted title - “session bait” anyone?

Google announces a simple new way to embed Google Maps Starting today, Google Maps users can add a map to their website or blog just by copying & pasting a snippet of HTML. This new functionality enables Google Maps users to share and disseminate geographic information in the same way that YouTube users share videos. Bloggers and webmasters no longer need an API key or knowledge of Java Script to put a Google Map on their website or blog.

Announcing the U.S. release of Microsoft Content Ads Beta We are delighted to make Content Ads Beta available to all U.S. customers! On Wednesday, August 29, we will upgrade adCenter to include Microsoft Content Ads.

Microsoft Content Ads allows you to place content-targeted ads on the Microsoft network—connecting you to the right people at the right time for the right price. We’re excited about this release and the choices we are providing advertisers.

Our New Webmaster Portal and an Invitation to the Private Beta Shortly after that day in March when we had to take the “link:” operator offline, a small team was formed in Redmond. Its singular focus: to build the next-generation set of tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters (and get “link:” back in your hands). Creatively named Webmaster Portal (we’re really good at marketing), it will be a single, friendly place to find all tools and information relating to Live Search SEO.

And Google is probably going to cost us more money, Improved top ad placement formula now in effect Two weeks ago, we posted about an upcoming improvement to the formula used to determine which ads are placed in the top spots above Google search results. The change offers advertisers more control over when their ads achieve top placement, while also increasing the quality of our ad results for users. Today, we wanted to let you know that the improved formula is now in effect.

Ya, but improved for who?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Contextual Advertising, Google, Linking Strategies, MSN, Online Marketing, Search Engines, Webmasters No Comments » August 2007

UK Internet Advertising Bureau Launches First Search Marketing Best Practice Charter

The Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK and the Direct Marketing Association are launching the first search marketing charter to establish best practices throughout the industry. Each search marketing company must meet four requirements to allow them to promote themselves on their websites and company literature.

The Internet Advertising Bureau – the trade association for internet marketing – and the Direct Marketing Association are launching the first search marketing charter to establish best practice throughout the industry. The charter includes four key requirements for search marketing companies in the UK.

This charter represents an important first step in the establishment of search marketing best practice in the UK. - Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau.

This is the first time industry bodies have collaborated on search standards in the UK. The charter is a product of the IAB search council and the DMA’s continued efforts to educate marketers about search marketing – currently worth 58% of all online advertising expenditure in the UK – and to reinforce advertiser and agency confidence in the medium. Source: Internet Advertising Bureau launches first search marketing best practice charter

The most interesting part of this announcement is the last paragraph that says,

“David White, chair of the IAB Search Council and Managing Director of search marketing company Weboptimser said: “We created the charter to help clients identify reliable suppliers who know, understand and demonstrate best practice within this fast moving industry. We have further plans for the charter that will include affiliate marketers and detail advanced search engine marketing techniques.”

So, they will be including affiliate marketers in future versions, should be interesting, too bad they are just recommended best practices and not required. Here are the four criteria, with more to be added before the end of the year.

• They must have at least two employees dedicated to search marketing
• They must have search engine accreditation (from Google or Microsoft with more to follow) and have received official search engine optimization (SEO) training as relevant
• The company must have been trading for 6 months
• The company must be a member of either IAB UK, IAB Europe, DMA or Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) or the Association of Business to Business Agencies (ABBA).

Download the document here.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, Search Engines 1 Comment » August 2007

Open Your Robots.txt File for Sitemaps.org

Here I didn’t think it could get any easier submitting sitemaps to search engines, but, it appears the search engines have decided on a sitemaps standard, and all you have to do is put one line in your robots.txt file and all the search engines who support it, Yahoo, Ask, Google, MSN, etc, will know exactly where it is.

Second, it’s now easier for you to tell us where your Sitemaps live. We wondered if we could make it so easy that you wouldn’t even have to tell us and every other search engine that supports Sitemaps. But how? Well, every website can have a robots.txt file in a standard location, so we decided to let you tell us about your Sitemap in the robots.txt file. All you have to do is add a line like

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

to your robots.txt file. Just make sure you include the full URL, including the http://. That’s it. Of course, we still think it’s useful to submit your Sitemap through Webmaster tools so you can make sure that the Sitemap was processed without any issues and you can get additional statistics about your site

Last but not least, Ask.com is now also supporting the Sitemap protocol. And with the ability to discover your Sitemaps from your robots.txt file, Ask.com and any other search engine that supports this change to robots.txt will be able to find your Sitemap file. Source: What’s new with Sitemaps.org?

Good stuff. Bruce Clay covered the Sitemaps summit,

Interestingly, Keith notes that less than 35 percent of servers have a robots.txt file. See, this explains why so much off-limits content is getting spidered and appearing in the index. It’s not the engine’s fault; it’s the site owners who didn’t read their robots.txt manual.

Some more fun facts from Keith: The majorities of robots.txt files are copied from others found online or are provided by a hosting site. This is a clear sign that site owners don’t know to use them. The files typically vary in size from 1 character to well over 256,000 characters, though the average robots.txt file is 23 characters. Source: Robots.txt Summit

LOTS more info on his site. As usual, Danny Sullivan has the whole thing covered in one blog post.

Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called auto discovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location is listed in a robots.txt file. Announcements are up from Google and Ask now Yahoo and Microsoft. Source: Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Search Engines No Comments » April 2007

Robots.txt Info from Google

Do you have some webpages on your site that you don’t want indexed? Do you want more control of what parts of your site the search engines, like Google, index? Google has published two parts of a three part series on the robots.txt file.

However, you may have a few pages on your site you don’t want in Google’s index. For example, you might have a directory that contains internal logs, or you may have news articles that require payment to access. You can exclude pages from Google’s crawler by creating a text file called robots.txt and placing it in the root directory. The robots.txt file contains a list of the pages that search engines shouldn’t access. Creating a robots.txt is straightforward and it allows you a sophisticated level of control over how search engines can access your web site.

In addition to the robots.txt file — which allows you to concisely specify instructions for a large number of files on your web site — you can use the robots META tag for fine-grain control over individual pages on your site. To implement this, simply add specific META tags to HTML pages to control how each individual page is indexed. Together, robots.txt and META tags give you the flexibility to express complex access policies relatively easily. Source: Controlling how search engines access and index your website

Most of the articles talk about using the meta tags on your site, like using the noindex, noarchive, nofollow and nosnippet, so I really don’t know why it says it is about the robots.txt file. For example, say you have a page that changes very often, you may want Google to not have the cache copy of your website.

Usually you want Google to display both the snippet and the cached link. However, there are some cases where you might want to disable one or both of these. For example, say you were a newspaper publisher, and you have a page whose content changes several times a day. It may take longer than a day for us to reindex a page, so users may have access to a cached copy of the page that is not the same as the one currently on your site. In this case, you probably don’t want the cached link appearing in our results. Source:

The next article is supposed to cover the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google, Search Engines No Comments » February 2007

How to Avoid the Google Filters

Just read a few good articles on how to avoid some of the filters that Google uses to weed out some of the spammy sites in their index. One article called Google Filters, how to get around them and exploit their loop holes was really a good read in that it listed a bunch of the filters and how to recover from them to increase your rankings or just get back in. I wouldn’t call it exploiting their loop holes as much as I would tips on how to avoid them, when I read exploit, I assumed some tips to artificially increase your rankings. Most of it boils down to, what else, links pointing in.

I have been doing SEO for some time now and I have been witness to many a strange occurrence regarding serps. Most of these weird occurrence I would have to say are directly attributed to a Google Filter or Google penalty. So I have been inspired by a post over at webmaster world and as far as I know there is not a current list out online that list’s all of the potential Google penalties so I have decided to put together an arbitrary list of potential Google Penalties. Please note that there is no proof i.e. press release from Google stating these exist but rather these are ideas, theories and assumptions from SEO’s experiences.

One that I have definitely seen at work in blogs is the supplemental results filter, as most posts loose steam after they move off the front page, unless they get some links from other websites, hopefully other than blogs, as their pages do the same thing, unless they are getting links in to every post, etc, etc.

Google Supplemental Results: Google supplemental results take pages on your site that have been indexed and put them into a sub database in Google. Supplemental results do not rank well but rather Google uses its supplemental DB to populate its results when they don’t have enough results to show in a given query. This means pages on your site in Google’s supplemental DB will not help you in the serps.

How to get through this: It’s pretty simple actually. Just get some inbound links to your pages. Check this post out to find out more about the Google Poo (supplemental results).

He also has a bigger post here, Supplemental Results and how to get out of the “Google Poo” has a little more depth on how the problem can occur.

Another post on the first site called 15 types of links and how to get themalso has some good info on link building, which will help you through most of the filters in the previous article.

Social Media Links
How to get them: Submit to them, search for them, create accounts and pimp them OUUUUT
what to look for: any sites that have to do with people getting together for a common goal
Examples: myspace, tickme.com, digg, stumbleupon
Tools: This is a great opportunity to create spam programs unless you want to go white hat then you can optimize this with tact like me
Notes: Links on social media do help. Not only is digg submissions actually ranking for results much like wikipedia does not but it also draw’s a ton of traffic to your site. Leverage social media to your favor and your seo efforts will come full circle!

I have in the past avoided Myspace like the plague, it is just so hideous, I can’t stand it, but I think I will create a Myspace page now and see what I can do with it, I mean, why not, it appears to be working for everyone else, and a link is a link, a link I can control is even better.

See how good content can help you build links and a better site? Right here in this article I linked to two of his pages on one site, and another page on a different site, he must have links flowing in like a river.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Search Engines No Comments » February 2007

All Yahoo Needs is Some Grape Jelly and Milk

A memo from Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, says that instead of a peanut butter sandwich, Yahoo should eat a spoonful of peanut butter, no wait, he said that Yahoo is spreading itself too thin, like peanut butter on a sandwich, a thin layer of investment spread across everything they do, meaning they don’t focus on anything, search, video, community, and it shows, compare it to the changes and innovations Google and MSN have been making. You can’t sit still anymore, someone is always gunning for your position, stop innovating and you start going downhill. I say, just throw some jelly on it. The article on the Wall Street Journal is called The Peanut Butter Manifesto, in case you were wondering about all of the peanut butter references.

We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.

We have lost our passion to win. Far too many employees are “phoning” it in, lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while — at all levels — employees are enabled to “hang around”. Where is the accountability? Moreover, our compensation systems don’t align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren’t adequately recognized for their efforts. Source: WSJ

He said he has three pillars to his plan to fix Yahoo, a company he says he loves, and bleeds purple and yellow thru and thru,

1. Focus the vision.
2. Restore accountability and clarity of ownership.
3. Execute a radical reorganization.

Oh and stop eating peanut butter.

That would suck, I love peanut butter. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch weighs in calling this Yahoo’s dirty laundry, and Yahoo’s PR department says that this shows they have a collaborative culture and that the leaders are committed, not committed, but committed.

My guess is that Yahoo senior management has been discussing these types of changes for some time, and this may be a power move by Garlinghouse to get in front of the parade. If changes are made, he looks like a hero. If they aren’t, he can take credit for trying.

Either way, at this point, I don’t see how Semel and Garlinghouse can both remain at Yahoo. From what I’m hearing, Semel may be the one to lose. The WSJ reports that Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig has put Garlinghouse in charge of a working group to review how the points in the memo can be put into action. Source: TechCrunch

J Leroy has a good post on this memo, Yahoo and what they should do called When Life Gives You Peanut Butter, Make Peanut Butter Cookies

Yahoo! seems to need to be taken out for a walk in the park, with a reassuring hug and “You’re a good person, Yahoo! Really you are.”

I think companies like Yahoo and Google are special in their own ways, Google did the best search, note I said did, web pages were small with no graphics and loaded very fast. Yahoo has more of a portal, more of a community built around their site, easy links to check your email, maps, everything from the front page. Yet, each seems to want what the other has, which can never happen, add the community stuff to Google and you’ll loose the people who liked Google the way it was, Yahoo can’t be more like Google without removing some of the stuff people like, sending their users elsewhere. It will be interesting to se who is still around in ten or twenty years, who thinks neither?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Search Engines, Yahoo 1 Comment » November 2006

So You Want to Start a Search Engine…

Now is the time to do it, well, if you are looking for a really easy way to do it, then Google has an option for you, it’s called [tag]Google Co-op[/tag] and it is a piece of cake. You create your account, name your search engine, change whatever settings you want to change, select the sites you want to search, and bamm, a brand new search engine. Check out the one I created at Serpsville.com, a technology only search engine. Note: Site is really bare, I need to create a logo and any about text I can think of. When you are searching for hardware or software help, you don’t want to see prices, you want help, so why include everything else? You can even let other people help you create it and edit it, a true user community search engine. Even if no one else uses it, it will be useful to me as Google’s results aren’t near as good as they used to be.

I did get some errors, so this is definitely still in beta, there are a couple things I couldn’t get to work, I figure someone else has had to report the same things by now, so hopefully it will get fixed soon.

We’re thrilled to tell you that the search for your own search engine is over. Today we are launching the Google Custom Search Engine. As you might imagine, it’s a simple and straightforward product to use and understand. In a matter of minutes you can create a search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests; looks and feels like your own; and, if you choose, you can make money from the traffic you receive through Google’s Adsense program. You can even invite your friends and trusted community members to add to and help build your search engine. Source: Google Blog

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch says,

This isn’t new - Rollyo, Eurekster and Yahoo already have similar products. But Google is also offering, as an option, to bundle the service with Google Adsense ads and share revenue with websites that embed the custom search engine into their site. Only Eurekster currently shares revenue with users. Yahoo’s product, which got a lot of press at launch, has barely been mentioned in the nearly three months since then.

For bloggers, using Google Co-op may be a better choice than the built in search feature. A search engine can be created that searches just a single site, and Google search is generally better than search features included with blog software, and with the addition of Adsense this will generate a separate income stream as well. Source: TechCrunch

Lots and lots of Buzz and new posts about Google Co-op, but lots of them seem to be me two’s and look at my new search engine type posts, just like this one.

Added: Here are some great examples from Vik Singh and an EECS student at UC Berkeley,

So what is it? It’s called Google Co-op, a platform which enables users to build their own vertical search engines and make money off the advertisements. It provides a clean, easy interface for simple site restrictions (like what Yahoo! Search Builder and Live Macros offer) but on top of that a ridiculous number of power user features for tweaking the search results. The user has control over the look and feel (to embed the search box on their own site), can rank results, and even (multi) tag sites to let viewers filter out results by category. Source: Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Google, Search Engines 1 Comment » October 2006

Alexa is Useful and Accurate, for the most part

While checking Techmeme I noticed this article called Why Alexa Is Worthless by John Chow. He says the usual things about how easy it is to manipulate the rankings be you and your friends installing the toolbar and surfing their own sites. He says,

You can even do it all by yourself by refreshing your site over and over again. Get a dozen friends to do it and you’re break into top 20,000 easily.

EEEHHHHHHHHH! Wrong. It says on their site they only count one page view per day per page, so you’ll have to actually surf around the site. Now, I’m sure its possible to use bots running on computers, making your employees install the toolbar, yadda, yadda, yadda, but anyone who has had a website for awhile can check their stats to see their traffic dip or rise in the charts at the exact time it drops, or raises in real life. He mentions that his site is 1,421 now, the 3 months number is 27,840, the one week number is 3,533, can you say traffic spike? He has apparently had a lot of digg traffic, so that would explain that, Hello? Who wants to bet this will be a spike in his charts in three months.

My main site that I have watched forever has had traffic patterns exactly the way it is on Alexa, it should my site getting dumped by Google update after Google update until it was gone completely and then its subsequent return. The numbers aren’t dead on but they are definitely close and are certainly close enough to make me believe the rankings of other sites, but I don’t just watch one day traffic numbers.

John, I just wanted to metion how dumb it looks for anyone to call themselves a mogul, didn’t you feel funny when you wrote this headlie?

John Chow dot Com The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul, because that is what I am - a Dot Com Mogul - and that is what I’ll be doing - rambling.

A mogul is a person who controls a large portion of a particular industry and whose wealth derives primarily from said control, now you may have a top 25,000 site, but that definitely does not qualify you to be a mogul. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, those are moguls, you are a webmaster of a tech site. Get over it.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Research, Search Engines, Traffic Rankings No Comments » September 2006

Yahoo and Oemji.com, A Match Made in Heaven?

Lot of stuff showing up recently about click fraud, online partnerships and whose watching the store, so this one should come as no surprise, Doing Business With A Controversial Partner part of the big click fraud story on Businessweek titled Click Fraud: The dark side of online advertising which I talked about here.

Yahoo turns ads over to a company associated with suspicious clicks, inflated bills, and “rogue” software. The relationship between Yahoo! and an obscure Web site called Oemji.com illustrates why a growing number of companies are worried about where their online ads are turning up and who’s actually clicking on them.

Yahoo recycles ads to Oemji even though several leading Internet security firms claim the site’s owner also distributes software that can deceive and annoy computer users. Yahoo’s own correspondence with Oemji’s parent, Oemtec Ltd., confirms that the online giant knows about the controversy. Yet Yahoo continues to send ads to Oemji that advertisers and online experts allege result in dubious clicks and inflated bills.

Questions about Oemji have arisen elsewhere. Computer security firms Sunbelt Software Inc. and Aladdin Knowledge Systems Inc. have posted consumer warnings, calling Oemji Bar a “browser hijacker,” meaning software that can replace unwary PC users’ search engines without permission, sometimes as they download other software from Oemtec.

Four other security firms, including giant Symantec Corp. (SYMC ), have issued alerts about a different Oemtec product called SpySpotter. Available until last month at spyspotter.com, this program is supposed to clean computers of spyware — programs that can track users’ Web surfing and send them pop-up ads. But Symantec and the others say SpySpotter is actually a “security risk” or “rogue” product, because it can install itself without permission and send exaggerated spyware warnings to entice PC users to sign up for a $29.95 annual subscription. “SpySpotter for a very long time has had a bad history of being force-installed or stealth-installed on people’s PCs,” says Eric L. Howes, who heads research on pernicious programs at Clear-water (Fla.)-based Sunbelt Software.

This is why advertisers need to demand accountability from advertising firms like Google and Yahoo, they want to keep all of their information a secret and tell you click fraud is no problem, nothing to see here, move along. They run their little reports and just give everyone the basics, and act like we should all be happy, but with online advertising pulling in billions and billions of dollars, their word is just not enough.

Yahoo and Google ads end up on to many websites that are just crap and there just to get people to click on links, and lots of people will either hit the back buttons, or they will click on something just to get away from some of these pages. Not to mention all of the click fraud scams going on with paid to read clubs, etc, online advertising can make you lots of money, but it can also cost you lots of money if you aren’t careful. Always check your return on investment and test campaigns before you start marketing “big time”. And a good suggestion is to just let your ads run on the search engines network and not the content network where most of the crap and the terrible ROI comes from, if you are going to let your ads run on the content network, then you should price your clicks CHEAP!

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Click Fraud, Contextual Advertising, Google, Online Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engines, Yahoo No Comments » September 2006

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