Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• 
  Utah Backtracks Search Ad Trademark Keyword Law
  The Google Public Policy Blog informed us that Utah reversed the law that restricted search engines from triggering ads based on trademarked terms. This reversal now puts Utah in sync with the precedent set forth by the federal trademark law. In short, you can now legally bid on trademarked terms…
• 
  Google Tests More TV Ads With AdWords Integration
  Google Integrates TV Ads Into Adwords Platform by Pinny Cohen shows screen captures of AdWords reports with TV ad integration. Pinny said that Google sent out more invitations for AdWords advertisers to test out TV ads within the Google AdWords system. The features you get with Google TV ads include:…
• 
  U.S. Pentagon Bans Google From Military Bases
  Google mappers banned from U.S. bases from the LA Times reports the U.S. Pentagon has banned Google street view photographers from accessing military bases. The ban came after street view photographs of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio were found on Google Maps. The Pentagon told all Defense Department bases…
• 
  Microsoft’s Google Obsession, MicroHoo’s Asian Outlook And Competing For Digg
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is perhaps showing signs of a mildly unhealthy obsession with rival Google. At Microsoft’s MIX08 online technology conference in Las Vegas yesterday he told interviewer Guy Kawasaki in a question and answer session that he was going to continue to chase Google in search even if…
• 
  Load Time Confirmed As AdWords Quality Score & New Category Exclusion Feature
  Google has confirmed that they will be adding page load time as a quality score metric in the near future. The feature will go live in the “next few weeks” but it won’t impact your quality score right away. A month after the metric goes live, Google will then implement…
• 
  Human Hardware: Working Memory
  At the recent SMX show in Santa Clara I had the opportunity to present at a couple of sessions that explored the topic of user behavior. One of the things I said in one of them is that humans are more alike than we’re different. Because of this, there…
• 
  Coming to SMX Advanced? Register Now for the Best Deal
  Registration is now open for Search Marketing Expo - SMX Advanced, which is taking place June 3-4 back at the incredible Bell Harbor International Conference Center on the waterfront in Seattle. SMX Advanced is for experienced search marketers who want to enjoy sessions conducted at a high-level. If you’re fluent…

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google must upgrade hosted apps to appeal to IT, analysts say, ComputerWorld
• How to get "new" Gmail in your Google Apps account, Download Squad

Business Issues

• Ask.com Will "Continue to be a Great Search Engine", Marketing Pilgrim
• Google says spam is huge corporate headache, News.com
• Google: Really, We’re Not Getting Into the Agency Business, Ad Age
• Tech Beat A Few Answers on Ask.com’s New Strategy, BusinessWeek
• hakia Participating in LangTech 2008, Hakia Blog
• Yahoo! wins sponsored links ruling in High Court, The Register

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Social Media Meets Local Search, Search Engine Watch

Microhoo

• Who mourns for Yahoo! Internet Life?, Los Angeles Times
• Microsoft-Yahoo deal would be a blow to Google in Asia, Reuters

Paid Search & Contextual

• AdWords Quality Score FAQ, PPC Discussions
• Diagnosing and treating revenue fluctuations (Part II), Inside AdSense
• Focus On Exact Match, adCenter Blog
• Optimizing your ad title colors for higher click through rate, JenSense
• Save Money to Make Money : Paid Search Auditing , Search Engine Journal
• Test Your Page Load Time Before Google Tests it For You, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• Confirmed: Google News closes eyes, hopes we’ll go away, Valleywag

SEM Industry

• 2009 SEMMY Awards: Planning is Underway (Wanna Help?) , Small Business SEM
• SEO License Plates | Funny SEM License Plates, I Am Not a Doctor
• SMX West 2008: Todd Malicoat WebProNews Videos, WebProNews
• SMX West 2008: WebProNews WebProNews Videos, WebProNews

SEO & SEM

• First date with the Googlebot: Headers and compression, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
• SEO and PR - Online Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing Blog
• Sometimes Fixing a Site Means Breaking It First, Search Engine Guide
• The Curious SEO, Search Marketing Sage
• Sales and Your Search Marketing Agency - Part 1, Search Engine Watch

Social Media

• Social networks will be like air, Charlene Li’s Blog

Video, Music & Image Search

• Baidu Launches Voice Search Service, ChinaTechNews.com
• Google’s YouTube To Power Other Video Sites? , Silicon Alley Insider

Web Analytics

• Google Analytics integrates with Google Audio Ads, Google Analytics Blog

Other Items

• Doodle4Google: Turkish Edition, Googlified
• Happy Women’s Day From Quintura!, Quintura blog

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• Why it’s NOT Linkbait, Idiot!
• SEO = Content, Site Architecture, Traffic & Popularity
• Who are the Linkerati?
• 10 Reasons Why Top Ten Lists Rock!
• Video: Twitter in Plain English
• Twitter is The New Facebook
• SEO and PR - Online Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization
• digg Almighty is NOT Social Media Marketing
• Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites
• SEO Q&A : Should You Use Google Webmaster Tools?
• Twitter Survey - How Do You Use Twitter Poll
• Ten ways market your blog on Twitter without being a spammer
• UK SEO Census - 9 Bloggers Under the Microscope
• Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Sculpting Your Pagerank

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

The Google Public Policy Blog informed us that Utah reversed the law that restricted search engines from triggering ads based on trademarked terms.

This reversal now puts Utah in sync with the precedent set forth by the federal trademark law. In short, you can now legally bid on trademarked terms in Utah, assuming you comply with the search engine’s trademark policy in your country.

Hello from sunny Austin Texas! I’m at South by Southwest for the week but I couldn’t possibly go without giving you the highlights of the week in search. So, without further ado, here you go!

From Barry: I put a ton of effort into this video to improve it and make it more “fun” to watch. I added illustrations, screen captures, captions and music throughout the video. Please take the time to watch it and give me your feedback via comments or the contact us form. Thank you!

Farewell, Ask.com

We saw it was coming, and then it happened: IAC has laid off 8% of the Ask.com workforce and decided to change their search strategy. Unfortunately, all brand evangelists (including my BFF) have decided to hang up the coat; Ask had promise and unfortunately money was more important. Danny’s harsh obituary for Ask.com also expresses resentment and disappointment. My favorite part was this:

You’ve decided that Ask is going to be reconfigured to appeal to women. I guess I missed the memo where women said they somehow needed a search engine that was different for them. What are you considering? Pink and lots of flowers? A recipe search? Maybe a section for working moms? Any more stereotypes you think might fly? Hey, why don’t you change CEOs again and put an actual woman in charge of the company that wants to build a search engine for women. That might be a good marketing move. Maybe bring back Jeeves the butler as we’ve all been expecting, but this time as a shirtless beefcake.

For the record, Mr. Safka, I’m a woman, and I’ll never use Ask again. I might poke fun at Jeeves and do what I did when I was growing up alongside him (asking “are you gay?” and seeing Jeeves answer “that’s not a nice question, is it?”), but that’s all. You lost a fan in me too.

On the same note, people are seeing that Ask.com is replacing its search with Google results. That’s just really sad. I have to express my disappointment in losing some wonderful colleagues, including Jim Lanzone and Gary Price. It’s a stupid stupid move. As many of my friends would say, gg (see definition #2).

Yahoo’s Search Update: March 2008

Yahoo is in the process of updating its ranking, indexing, and crawling algorithms. So far, nobody has spotting anything different, but we’d like to know if you see something.

Google Sitewide Search Results in SERPs

If you search for “wikipedia” in Google, you’ll now see a sitewide search box. It’s live as of Thursday morning to everyone, but beforehand, only a few people saw it (and I tipped Barry off on it and Search Engine Land hit Techmeme! Score!)

Yahoo Buzz Takes On Digg

While late to the game, Yahoo Buzz has been launched and can be likened to a quality Digg — using editorial consideration. I’m game, baby.

Google Cached the Wrong Page

A number of webmasters have reported that Google is caching the wrong pages. I haven’t really been paying attention, but this isn’t the first time I heard about this. Are your pages cached correctly?

Your Minimum Google AdWords Bids Are Going Up

If your Google AdWords bids have been going up, you’re not alone. Advertisers report the “Google slap” where they are seeing that their minimum bids have gone up the wazoo. It started on the 5th. Why? We don’t know…

The Google Oops!

Google forgot to renew their SSL certificate for conversion tracking and then fixed it almost instantly. We know that it happens to us small folks, but it also happens to the big guys (and in that case, the whole world knows pretty quickly).

Exclude Certain Categories from Google AdWords

Selling blue widgets and don’t want your site to appear on sites that don’t have any relationship whatsoever to blue widgets? You can now exclude categories of sites from displaying your ads. I have to say that this. is. awesome.

Does Sculpting or Siloing Really Control PageRank?

A lot of people are in disbelief that sculpting and siloing your pages controls PageRank but others think that it helps. If your site is so optimized that there’s nothing left (from what you can tell), why not try it out and see what you can do? Then report back to us with your findings.

Your AdWords Quality Score Depends on Page Load

If your site loads slowly, you’re in big trouble if you want a high quality score. It is now known that page load does factor in on quality score and if your site can’t meet demands for users, you’ll unfortunately suffer the consequences. It’s time to consider what’s more important: cheap hosting or reliable service?

Have a great week(end), everyone!

Google Integrates TV Ads Into Adwords Platform by Pinny Cohen shows screen captures of AdWords reports with TV ad integration. Pinny said that Google sent out more invitations for AdWords advertisers to test out TV ads within the Google AdWords system.

The features you get with Google TV ads include:

Click to continue reading…

Google mappers banned from U.S. bases from the LA Times reports the U.S. Pentagon has banned Google street view photographers from accessing military bases. The ban came after street view photographs of Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio were found on Google Maps.

The Pentagon told all Defense Department bases to restrict access to all Google vehicles access.

Click to continue reading…

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is perhaps showing signs of a mildly unhealthy obsession with rival Google. At Microsoft’s MIX08 online technology conference in Las Vegas yesterday he told interviewer Guy Kawasaki in a question and answer session that he was going to continue to chase Google in search even if it costs him his “last breath”: “So it may be my last breath at Microsoft, but we’re going to be there, working away, building share.”

Click to continue reading…

Google has confirmed that they will be adding page load time as a quality score metric in the near future. The feature will go live in the “next few weeks” but it won’t impact your quality score right away. A month after the metric goes live, Google will then implement the grade into the overall quality score. I still have a few questions pending answers from Google on this topic and hope to postscript this post when I get the answers.

Google also enhanced the site exclusion feature in AdWords by breaking out a way to also exclude by category. The Inside AdWords blog announced the new feature allows advertisers to “exclude certain categories of webpages from your content network campaigns in addition to excluding individual sites.”

Click to continue reading…

Seems like yesterday, German Google users were unable to access any of the Google properties including Google.com, Google Mail, Google Groups, Google Reader and so on.

Reportedly it impacted both Telekom and 1&1 users. Google Blogoscoped is based on Germany and has a lot of details on the downtime. In fact, he received a statement while Google was offline in Germany that translated into:

Apparently this afternoon there were problems with accessing Google through a provider. We are currently investigating the causes and hope that users will soon be able to access Google as usual.

There is also a huge thread at the Abakus German Forum that has tons and tons of German SEOs talking about the downtime. It seems like it was fairly serious. But it is not working.

Forum discussion at Abakus German Forum and WebmasterWorld.

Google keeps adding new ways for AdWords advertisers to fine tune where their ads are displayed within the Google content network. Last night the Inside AdWords blog announced the new feature that allows you to now exclude categories of sites from displaying your ads. Here is how it looks within the AdWords interface:

The old site exclusion interface:

Exclude your ad by site topic:

Exclude by page type:

I am very pleased they keep adding more granularity for advertisers in choosing where their ads should be displayed.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

So Google confirmed page load time will be a factor in the quality score and it is just a matter of time for this to be implemented. In fact, the Inside AdWords blog posted an official announcement about it last night.

Search Engine Watch Forums moderator, abbottsys, doesn’t want to wait for Google to test his page’s load time, instead, he is taking action now. He posted a nifty tool to test a page load time. The tool is at Pingdom.com and is pretty nifty.

Here is a graph of the load time for my article above:

My total load time is 1.9 seconds, what is really slowing me down is the Google Custom Search Engine which took the longest time to load.

So test out your landing pages before Google does. Yes, you will have several weeks of Google testing them out for you, but if you are in a rush, why wait? Plus, who cares what Google finds to be slow now, it is more about closing your deal.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I honestly wanted to avoid this topic, but due to the amount of attention on this topic right now, it is our duty to let the non-forum activists know about the controversy.

Shari Thurow authored an article on Search Engine Land named You’d Be Wise To “NoFollow” This Dubious SEO Advice. In short, Shari said worry more about your site architecture then using the nofollow attribute to funnel your PageRank, sculpt your PageRank, or silo your site for search engines. Shari is of the opinion that a quality site does not have to worry about it, while others, including Stephan Spencer’s Search Engine Land article named Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact says it works.

Honestly, there is no doubt in my mind that using the nofollow attribute or even JavaScript or a robots.txt file to manage your PageRank and link popularity flow works. It is nothing new and has been done for ages, just not with the nofollow, since the nofollow is relatively new. Do I do it? No. Why? Cause I focus more on other things, which I think is Shari’s point. Would I benefit from doing it? Probably.

Michael Gray’s Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Sculpting Your Pagerank takes issue with picking on those who do sculpt PageRank. He says there is nothing wrong with it at a macro level. It all depends in my opinion.

At SMX West a buddy showed me his site and asked me what more he can do. This site was absolutely optimized to the T. Pages that didn’t have much content were nofollowed via the link and noindexed on the page level. The detail he put into his site was truly amazing. It all depends on priorities and resources. I say, if you got the time, why not sculpt. Google is not handing out penalties to those who use the nofollow and in the Linking Q&A panel, Matt Cutts was asked:

Q: PageRank sculpting/siloing: should we do that?
Matt: In general, worry more about the high quality of your site. After you’ve taken care of it, then think about sculpting. Put your best pages on top - your best selling products should be linked from your homepage. The nofollow and metatags essentially do the same kind of thing. Google is against abusive manipulation.

So why not, if you have exhausted everything else you could have done on your site.

In any event, the discussion is incredibly heated at Sphinn, so enjoy.

The other day, SEOmoz released what they named SEO Analytics. The beauty about this package is that nothing needs to be installed on your site, all this does is watch the search space for signals on your domain. It really does not track rankings or traffic, it does however track links, search engine saturation, mentions and more. Here are some screen captures via SEOmoz:

Google Mentions:

Live Search Saturation or Index Count:

Google News Mentions:

This is a hybrid of a reputation management system with SEO details. If you are looking for a purely online reputation management application, check out Andy Beal’s Trackur, by the way.

Right now, the SEOmoz tool tracks “brand” mentions in Google web search, Google blog search, Google news search, and domain mentions in Google. It also tracks linkage data in Yahoo web search, Yahoo Site Explorer, Technorati, and Google Blog Search. Plus it site inclusion stats in Google, Yahoo, Yahoo Site Explorer, Live Search and Ask.com.

If you are looking for a more robust SEO specific tool that correlates your search rankings and stats with your site traffic and are willing to install tracking code, then maybe Enquisite Beta is for you. The reporting functionality in that tool is incredibly comprehensive. Here is a short list of what it can do, but you can learn more at this page:

• Coordinate and monitor traditional marketing activities and online marketing campaigns
• Gain valuable business intelligence to fine tune your online and offline marketing efforts and drive sales growth
• Determine and exploit search and business trend lines
• Compare and refine traffic patterns from different search engines
• Discover keywords used to acquire search traffic from one engine and apply those keywords to improve performance at the other engines
• Compare search traffic from different geographic communities to better determine and take advantage of key marketplaces
• Monitor PPC traffic to ensure it corresponds with your pre-set campaign parameters.
• Build your business by increasing online and offline sales conversions
• Know your market

And of course, we have Google Analytics and many other great tracking tools.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

alt="Just Behave - A Column From Search Engine Land" align="left"
hspace="5" vspace="3" width="100" height="100">At the recent SMX show in Santa Clara I had the opportunity to present at a couple of sessions that explored the topic of user behavior. One of the things I said in one of them is that humans are more alike than we’re different. Because of this, there are some behaviors that a determined by hardwired traits. I call these Human Hardware issues. I’ve touched on some of these in past columns, but I’d like to dive a little deeper in this series.

Click to continue reading…