Is The SEM Market Shrinking?

Is The SEM Market Shrinking?

Interesting point regarding the acquisition of Proxicom, a web development agency, by iCrossing, one of the worlds biggest SEO firms:
“So why would a company on such a hot streak decide to part with its money and invest in a web development company? The answer: The SEM market is shrinking”.
How many large scale companies can you think of that aren’t already participating in SEM?
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Original post by Pete and software by Elliott Back

Yahoo Collaborative Tagging Suggestions Use Goodness to Combat Tag Spam

Tagging allows people to assign labels to contents using keywords, so that they can share what they find, recall what they’ve looked at before, and discover content that others have labeled.
Tagging can also be prone to spam, and to bad suggestions for tags. A Goodness Measure might be used to offer suggestions for tags, that avoids bad tags and spam in those suggestions, and that looks at:

The authority of a person tagging,

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Yahoo Collaborative Tagging Method Uses Goodness to Combat Tag Spam

Tagging allows people to assign labels to contents using keywords, so that they can share what they find, recall what they’ve looked at before, and discover content that others have labeled.
Tagging can also be prone to spam, and to bad suggestions for tags. A Goodness Measure might be used to offer suggestions for tags, that avoids bad tags and spam in those suggestions, and that looks at:

The authority of a person tagging,

Read the rest of this entry »

Are Directories Worthwhile?

Rand gives his views on link building using directories. He’s hedging a little, but I think it’s fair to say, he’s not a big fan. He also appears to me to be suggesting people only defend directories because they have a vested interest.
Heh. That might be me
I disagree with the article, mostly because […]
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Original post by Peter Da Vanzo and software by Elliott Back

How Quickly Does Google Update its Database(s)?

David Degrelle, of e-SEMA (European Search Engine Marketing Alliance) tells me that Google is pretty quick these days, and his blog post - Google calculates SERP’s in 14 minutes and goes real time! points to a quick turnover time.
I’d be a little surprised if Google refreshed it’s whole index in that quick a period of time - there are so many websites to crawl, including new sites, and updated pages, that it seems unlikely. Yet, blogs that ping Google when there are updates may find the content of their pages getting indexed pretty quickly. And I’ve seen times indicated for news results at Google News that are minutes old, rather than hours.

Copyright © 2007 SEO by the SEA. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at may be guilty of copyright [...] Read the rest of this entry »

ChaCha Search - Is People Powered Search Better?

I really haven’t taken a close up look at ChaCha Search before today, but the idea is interesting - using human search guides whom can ask you specific questions about what you are looking for, and who will help you find answers.
A question raised by the approach is how well can it scale - can it handle questions from a lot of people, and are there enough expert searchers who would participate?
I’ve run across two patent applications assigned to them, and an unassigned one listing the CEO of the company as the inventor, and referred to by one of the assigned patent filings:
Search Tool Providing Optional Use of Human Search Guides
Invented by Scott A. Jones, and Thomas F. Cooper
Assignee Name and Adress: ChaCha Search, Inc.
US Patent Application 20070174273
Published July 26, 2007
Filed: September 1, 2006
Abstract
A method and system providing optional use of human search [...]

Original post by William Slawski and software by Elliott Back

Why Sometimes Best Search Results aren’t Always Top Search Results

When we talk about the results that show up in search engines, we often do so in terms related to relevance and importance of those results.
Sometimes the results we see, and that we don’t see, are influenced by other factors, such as steps taken by the search engines to reduce the amount of work that they have to perform in order to return results to searchers.
Using Two Tiers of Search Results
If a search potentially returns thousands of results, and people only look at the first few pages of those results, it would make sense for a search engine to serve results in batches, and perhaps only initially use a modified (and much smaller) version of their database to answer search queries.
A first index tier may have a number of potential results pruned, so that documents that are more likely to be returned [...]

Original post by William Slawski and software by Elliott Back

The Search Works Acquired by TradeDoubler

It’s been announced today that the UK’s biggest search engine optimisation company, The Search Works, has been acquired by TradeDoubler in a deal worth £56 million which includes the PPC product Bid Buddy.
This is very big news for the UK search industry and follows iCrossing’s purchase of Spannerworks in February. It will be interesting to follow how The Search Works moves forward now under TradeDoubler.
For more information please read the press release.
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Original post by Kev and software by Elliott Back

The Search Works Acquired by TradeDoubler!

It’s been announced today that the UK’s biggest search engine optimisation company, The Search Works, has been acquired by TradeDoubler in a deal worth £56 million which includes the PPC product Bid Buddy.
This is very big news for the UK search industry and follows iCrossing’s purchase of Spannerworks in February. It will be interesting to follow how The Search Works moves forward now under TradeDoubler.
For more information please read the press release.
————————-Search Engine Marketing - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
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Original post by Kev and software by Elliott Back

Google Patent Granted on Semantic Units (Meaningful Compounds)

When searchers type a query into a search engine, it isn’t uncommon for them to use more than one word. It also isn’t unusual for those words to be a semantically meaningful phrase rather than just a list of keywords.
Multiple search terms entered by a user are often more useful if considered by the search engine as a single compound unit. Assume that a user enters the search terms “baldur’s gate download.” The user intends for this query to return web pages that are relevant to the user’s intention of downloading the computer game called “baldur’s gate.” Although “baldur’s gate” includes two words, the two words together form a single semantically meaningful unit. If the search engine is able to recognize “baldur’s gate” as a single semantic unit, called a compound herein, the search engine is more likely to return the web pages desired by the user.

A Google patent, [...] Read the rest of this entry »

UK Web Traffic Dropping Because of Floods

I’ve noticed a significant drop in UK web traffic stats this week which seems to be a result of the country being hit by floods.
There’s been an obvious difference for a couple of websites who’s traffic is largely from England and many of my AdWords clients have also seen a drop in clicks for UK targeted campaigns due the lower search volume this week.
Floods in Ock Street, Abingdon: Being in Abingdon, right on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, we’re in one of the worst hit areas and a lot of people here can’t get into work so that’s obviously affecting things, I still have internet access so can’t use the same excuse! The floods are supposed to start clearing up now so hopefully it will improve for everyone affected and the UK internet traffic should pick back up soon.
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Original post by Kev and software by Elliott Back

The Purple Cow, by Seth Godin

This is a story of a young girl who recently moved to Paris, where she discovers her budding sexuality…
Oops, sorry, wrong book.
Most folks reading this blog have most likely already read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow (aff link). Aaron Wall first recommended it to me, years ago, and since then pretty much everybody in […]
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Original post by John Scott and software by Elliott Back

Looking at Users’ Final Landing Pages to Develop Suggestions for Query Refinements

It’s getting pretty common for search engines to suggest query revisions when someone does a search these days.
One common query revision strategy is to look at the query sessions from previous searchers who used the same query, and see how they might have refined their searches, including spelling corrections, or adding and deleting words in subsequent queries during the same session.
A paper from Microsoft researchers, Query Suggestion based on User Landing Pages, takes that approach, and looks at using it in conjunction with another approach that looks at what they call “final landing pages.”
This poster investigates a novel query suggestion technique that selects query refinements through a combination of many users’ post-query navigation patterns and the query logs of a large search engine. We compare this technique, which uses the queries that retrieve in the top-ranked search results places where searchers end up after post-query browsing [...]

Original post by William Slawski and software by Elliott Back

5 Reasons Why You Should Submit to Yahoo! Site Explorer

Having only submitted this site to Yahoo Site Explorer last week I was surprised to find some nice extra features which I hadn’t expected today.
Here’s a screenshot of the stats for seoptimise.com:
Just in case anyone else has taken as long as me, and perhaps didn’t see the point in submitting to Yahoo Site Explorer, here are 5 good reasons why you should submit your site:
1) Language informationMake sure Yahoo! knows the correct language of your website.
2) Last Crawl DateWhen viewing your own site’s page’s you are listed with a date/time stamp for when each page was last crawled.
3) SubdomainsView the different subdomains Yahoo have indexed for your website.
4) Getting a new site indexedFor websites having problems with getting indexed in Yahoo! submiting to Yahoo Site Explorer can help to speed up the process.
5) Submit a site feedMake sure Yahoo! finds your latest blog posts quickly by submitting your RSS [...]

Original post by Kev and software by Elliott Back