This Week In SEO - 4/13/07

by Steven Bradley
on Friday, April 13th, 2007
in This Month In SEO

Are you superstitious? It’s Friday the 13th today as if I needed to tell you. This Week was supposed to be a slow blogging week with Search Engine Strategies going on in New York. I expanded my reading list a little bit and found the usual amount of links for your reading pleasure. Plenty of good stuff including links to notes on many of the SES sessions. As always let’s start of the links with social media.

Social Media

A couple of research studies kick off social media this week. In what will likely come as no surprise, Alden DoRosario for Chitka found that Google traffic is three times as likely to click an ad as Digg traffic. iProspect surveyed people to determine how social networking sites are being used. One conclusion of the study is to keep focusing on search engines as they still get more eyeballs than any of the social media sites.

Kevin Newcomb takes a look at why search marketers are expanding into social media. Muhammad has some stats to show why your profile at social media sites can be used to drive traffic and also tells us how StumbleUpon can be used to determine what your audience thinks of your site.

One of these days I promise I really will get over to Twitter and see what the buzz is all about. For now take a look at Neil Patel’s article on how Twitter can generate traffic. And if you decide Twitter isn’t for you maybe Jaiku will be. MG Siegler offers a comparison of the two. All’s fair when it comes to social media competition. Earlier in the week, apparently just as rumor was growing that Photobucket was for sale, MySpace started blocking Photobucket videos. TechCrunch has the story.

Blogging

I really enjoyed the posts I found on blogging this week. Ahmed Bilal wrote two of them. First he asks if we would read our own blog. An honest answer will be the quickest way to make improvements. And next he wants us to get rid of most of our feeds (except this one of course). Chris Garret takes a look at some bloggers and how they’ve profited indirectly from their blogs and Carson Brackney shares his experience when he discovered the people reading his blog weren’t his intended audience.

One of my favorite articles all week was from Tom Johnson who looked at the lessons other bloggers had learned and condensed their experiences into twenty tips for us. Do you like lists? Solomon Rothman has one with 102 items. It’s a much quicker read than it sounds (short bullet points) and is sure to have some good advice for everyone.

You’ve no doubt caught the latest blog meme by now asking why do you blog. Steven Rich took a look at the meme and answered his own question about how blogs have increased human intelligence.

SEM Scholarship Contest

If you’ve been coming here for any length of time you’re likely aware that I’m a fan of Marketing Pilgrim’s SEM Scholarship Contest. I generally haven’t cared for seo contests, but I like this one a lot. You can read about my experience with the first contest to understand why. My schedule kept me out of the contest this time around, but there have been some very good articles contributed. From what I’ve read so far I think the quality of the articles has improved compared to the first contest.

SEO Miscellany

George W. Bush is apparently a failure again, though he’s no longer the miserable failure he was before Google made some algorithmic tweaks to prevent Googlebombing. Danny Sullivan has the rundown on why his failings are back.

Having your feed seen as duplicate content can have disastrous impact on your search rankings. FeedBurner has some suggestions to keep your feed from being indexed more than once. Daniel at Daily Blog Tips has some ideas on using rel=”nofollow ” on your FeedBurner feeds to prevent duplicate content issues as well. Speaking of nofollow, recently there’s been backlash against using it on blog comments. Randa Clay has even started the “I Follow” movement.

It seems like 302 hijacking may be back. Aaron Wall gets the comments started on Thredwatch and also links to a Digital Point thread discussing the issue. The search engines have all gotten together to make Sitemaps easier to deal with and Raj Dash dishes out the good and bad about search.

SES

I mentioned at the start that Search Engine Strategies is going on in New York this week. There was lots of coverage, but I think Search Engine Roundup and Search Engine Land did the best job covering the various sessions. Warning: Each of the links below will lead you to a lot of further links. Personally I don’t care much for reading other people’s notes on a presentation, but I wanted to include these for those who find value in it.

General Business and Marketing

I’m not crazy about the name I’ve given this category, but I like the content on the other side of these links. Consider this group of links as some tips and ideas for marketing your business that don’t require a search engine to be involved.

Shoemoney reminds us that the emotional response your customers feel during their interaction with you is more important than the interaction itself. Seth Godin (who you should all read) says to embrace change to create new market niches. Bill Slawski has advice on how small businesses can network both online and offline.

Brian Clark shares a story about content promotion which I think has lessons that go beyond your page content. And Roberta Rosenberg filling in for Brian for the day has 10 tips to improve the copy on your landing pages.

Search Engine News

I’m sure this will come as a shock, but Google Accounted For 64 Percent Of All U.S. Searches In March 2007. They’re certainly not the only search engine, though they seem to be the only engine gaining market share, which is rather impressive since they already have the largest share of the market.

Google
Some of those 64% of searches go through AOL which gets it’s results from Google. Late last week John Battelle broke the news that Google and AOL had worked out a deal to allow AOL advertisers to target only AOL audience members in the first white label version of AdWords. As you would imagine the news was a hot topic for discussion early in the week.

Fred Vogelstein interviews Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, for Wired Magazine and Eric Enge interviews Rajat Mukherjee, Project Lead for Google Custom Search Engines.

Google’s Click Quality and Security Teams published a paper on botnet-based click fraud and Jeremy Luebke provides some thoughts on the report.

This just in: Google to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion as reported by MSNBC.

Yahoo!
Yahoo may have dealt Google a blow by agreeing to a deal with Viacom to provide search advertising for 33 of the media company’s sites. You may recall Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement.

Yahoo! Site Explorer is now out of beta and also added a feature to submit mobile sites and feeds. Yahoo! Maps has improved the printable version of driving directions pages to make it more interactive. And Bill Slawski points to a Yahoo! patent exploring the idea of matching print articles and advertisements.

MSN
MSN adCenter is planning a new release in the next 4 to 6 weeks and Eric Enge was given a peak. He’s summarized some of the new features. Robert J. Murray interviews Live Search General Manager, Derrick Connell. Can you believe it’s been a year since MSN began calling itself Live Search? It’s also been a year that most of us still refer to it often as MSN. I do it just because it’s less typing.

Ask
One place where many think you could challenge Google is in vertical search. Eric Enge has another interview for us, this time with Ask’s Gary Price about vertical search. The big news though, when it came to Ask this week is that they’re set to launch a new algorithm, code named Edison. Barry Schwartz broke the news and Bill Slawski discusses some Ask patents related to ‘Edison.’

Happy Friday the 13th everyone. For a change the weather looks like it will be nice here in Boulder this weekend. Snow was predicted for the last couple of days, but it never made its way here. The sun is finally breaking through and the temperature seems to be warming. Maybe this weekend I’ll be able to get out on my bike like I’ve wanted to the last couple of weeks. Enjoy your weekend wherever you are.

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