Most webmasters have two goals for their online businesses: to be financially successful and to be self-sustaining. Ideally, webmasters want to be fully established and top of mind so the business they have supplies all the business they need. Sweet scenario if you can get it but the reality is, you have to work long and hard for that type of self-sustaining business. One way to start the flow is to work on attracting a steady stream of referrals.
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.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.
From Search Engine Land:
Search News From Around The Web:
Applications & Portal Features
Link Building
Local, Maps & Mobile
Paid Search & Contextual
Searching
SEM Industry
SEO & SEM
Social Media
Video, Music & Image Search
Other Items
Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social
News Sharing Site:
With the EU’s
blessing, Google has finally acquired DoubleClick after
nearly a year in
trying. Google has
blogged that the acquisition has been completed, with CEO Eric Schmidt
saying:
Reaction to the acquisition can be found
via Techmeme.
Today in Search
Biz: Those Linux-based "Google PCs" didn’t sell like hotcakes, says Walmart.
Yahoo gets a small paid search distribution deal with LiveDeal. The fight for
IAC continues, DoubleClick may see layoffs after Google takes over, and Yahoo’s
old CEO might be partnering with a Steven Spielberg-backed network for those who
have had paranormal or extraterrestrial experiences. TheTruthIsOutThereBook,
anyone?
When a webmaster was looking at his site data in Google Webmaster Tools, he noticed that one of the “Pages with external links” was linking to his IP address and not his site. He’s pretty baffled about why that would be the case. He has no way of reconciling this as far as he’s investigated, and it looks like it may not even be possible from what Tedster says.
This kind of thing can happen when some inept webmaster links to you using your ip address - I once had this happen with a link from a major newspaper! Ionly discovered the source through the server log referers - not through a link report from any search engine. Apparently Webmaster Tools got this crossed up in your case, however it happened that they found the ip address.
That sucks. A lot. It especially sucks if they decide to use your IP address when you’re on shared hosting and the link never shows up to the reader. It’s a poor user experience all around and nobody really benefits. Please consider to use a real URL and not an IP when you link to people. Thank you on behalf of all competent webmasters and users.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
This morning I checked my Google Analytics for dozens of sites and noticed that the reports are missing yesterday’s statistics. The March 10, 2008 data are missing from all my reports.
Is Google Analytics lagged? Did they have some sort of hiccup?
A Google Groups thread has other Google Analytics users complaining this morning, but then I saw this post:
I had panicked when I saw this too, but the numbers are still in the report, they are just not being displayed in the graph. If you highlight yesterday’s date you can see the numbers below the graph.
It is true, while the visitors graph seems a day behind, if you change the date in the date drop down to today, it will actually show the correct stats in the detailed reports.
There are also many people complaining about it on Twitter including Scott and Brian.
I wonder when the visual reporting will be fixed?
Forum discussion at Google Groups.
Loren Baker decided that it’s time to start using Twitter. But besides giving valuable information about how to use Twitter for your own personal interactions, Loren blogged about how to use Twitter as a traffic generator to your blog. He explains the process which requires setting up the Twitterfeed application.
We at Search Engine Roundtable have actually been using Twitter for our feeds for quite some time. You can subscribe to our updates at http://twitter.com/seroundtable.
There’s also an alternative way to set up Twitter to feed your RSS content — because Twitterfeed didn’t exist before. Barry writes about it on his blog. The question is: where’s the code? 
If you want to follow Barry or me, you can do so by adding the following names:
rustybrick
tamar
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
Marketing on social media sites. What works. What doesn’t. That’s what you’ll learn and SMX Social Media.
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I’ve run across a number of local business sites which offer event calendars of some sort, and many of these companies may not be aware that they can and should add hCalendar Microformat to their pages to further optimize them for both search and user-experience. I’ve previously recommended hCard Microformat for optimizing local business sites, and hCalendar can offer similar advantages, particularly as the evolution of blended search results continues.
The European Commission has approved the Google acquisition of DoubleClick valued at $3.1 billion.
The EU started their investigation in November 2007. The commission found that the “transaction would be unlikely to have harmful effects on consumers, either in ad serving or in intermediation in online advertising markets.”
Viacom Denied Punitive Damages In YouTube Suit from the Silicon Valley Insider reports a US District Court has denied Viacom’s request for punitive damages against Google over the YouTube copyright claims.
Judge Louis Stanton said “common-law punitive damages cannot be recovered under the Copyright Act,” and denied Viacom’s action against Google and YouTube. This does not mean Google won, far from it.
Display advertising currently represents about 32 percent of total US online advertising according to the IAB. That’s roughly $6.7 billion. Google already dominates the roughly $8.5 billion US search market. But Google’s Tim Armstrong told the Bear Stearns Media Conference in Palm Beach, Florida yesterday that Google expects, in the not-too-distant future, to have a “very significant” position in online display advertising, and if the company didn’t achieve that he would be “very disappointed.”
Although occasionally used on its own, paid search can be a great complement to an organic optimization strategy. Research has shown that having a presence in both natural and paid results increases the overall likelihood of receiving a click.
This week’s infographic breaks down some of the main ways in which PPC advertisers can positively affect campaign click-through rates:
The results are in, and SEOs voted on which link they would prefer.
65% of SEOs said they would prefer an old and aged link over a fresh and new link. 35% said they want the newer fresh links over the older links.
We polled our readers back in late January and with 113 responses today, I think the verdict is in. At least we have a overwhelming majority opting one way as opposed to being undecided.
Our last poll results showed SEO’s cant agree on the value of an image link, but I think, for the most part, SEOs can agree on this question.
Continued forum discussion at SitePoint Forums.
Chances are if you’re reading this you’re either running a cost-per-click (CPC) advertising campaign or are considering it. So you probably know that CPC advertising involves selecting a set of keywords and writing an ad to appear when someone searches for that keyword in the major search engines. And you’re aware that CPC advertising requires you to set a cost that you are prepared to pay for a click. And you are probably familiar with the benefits of CPC advertising; namely, generating leads, driving sales, and creating brand awareness.
But what you may not know yet are these ten tips that can increase the effectiveness of your CPC campaign, while also helping to keep your search engine marketing budget on track. These tips focus on Google AdWords, but many apply to CPC programs across the board.
Some publishers feel you may see a slight spike in your Google AdSense income in the near future. Why? As martinibuster reports in a WebmasterWorld thread, many AdWords advertisers, including myself, have received emails from Google to give the content network a try. Meaning, if the advertiser was not using the content network - now maybe they will be putting some money towards those ads and help boost up earnings for publishers.
The email explains the tools advertisers have to give them the control over the content network they once wanted, probably before they decided to opt out years ago.
There is no AdSense earnings have been lower in the past few months then they ever have. Maybe this email and the new features will help spark some life into the content network and boost publishers earnings? Or maybe not! As this WebmasterWorld thread says, the new category exclusion feature may result in many publishers noticing an even larger drop in their earnings.
Time will tell in these cases.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Yesterday I reported that AdSenseAdvisor seemed to have gone MIA (missing in action) since mid-January of this year. Later that day, a new AdSenseAdvisor introduced them-self at WebmasterWorld.
The re-introduction thread at WebmasterWorld reads:
Our old ASA has taken on new responsibilities, and I’m delighted to announce that I will be your new ASA.
Going forward, you can expect greater involvement from our side, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on AdSense, and representing you here at Google.
I look forward to working with you all.
That is great news. The old ASA is moving up? The new ASA promises “greater involvement!”
Like I have told past search engines representatives, welcome and we will be watching you like a hawk.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Last December, we reported that MSNBot was failing a reverse DNS lookup. Well, guess what folks - MSNBot is failing again on some IP addresses.
An updated WebmasterWorld thread brought this to my attention and I verified it myself. Here is a sample crawl of MSNBot 1.1, the new MSNBot, crawling under the IP address 65.55.232.12 and the reverse lookup propagates to a host name of bl1sch2041303.phx.gbl with no A-Record for bl1sch2041303.phx.gbl on the domain phx.gbl.
The thread has other IP addresses with MSNBot acting stealthy:
65.55.104.29 - - [29/Feb/2008:02:46:46 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 403 *** “-” “msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”
65.55.104.173 - - [07/Mar/2008:03:53:54 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 403 *** “-” “msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”
65.54.165.47 - - [08/Mar/2008:14:05:33 +0100] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 *** “-” “msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)”
The one above is mine, but there are other MSNBot crawls that do pass the reverse DNS test, just some are not.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.