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+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ ********************* Catch and cache past installments of SearchWrite SearchNews in the http://www.searchwrite.com/Pages/searchnews.htm ********************** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The downpour of news from this week's SMX Advanced search marketing conference in Seattle (sorry about the weather, folks) begins with the arrival of a new Microsoft adCenter Desktop tool for managing your pay-per-click campaigns. The new tool, now in beta-by-invitation stage, was introduced by Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Platform & Services Division, during his keynote remarks. Johnson was recently dubbed by Fortune magazine as "The Man who would('ve) Run Yahoo!" Well, we'll have to wait and see about that! The new offline editing tool extends the capabilities of adCenter managers, especially in the areas of bulk campaign management and research tools, and offers "Creation Wizard" functionality for creating new campaigns through the interface. Microsoft will continue developing its Web-based tools alongside the offline application, although some functionality will only be added to one or the other. Microsoft began offering offline tools with its adCenter Add-in for Excel 2007, which launched in December. On the lighter side of Microsoft., the Live Search Blog announced the new launch of Search and Give. When you search and Search and Give, Microsoft will donate a penny each time you use that page to search the Web.
Web publishing decisions are so often geared to winning inclusion of content, the notion of excluding content can easily be overlooked. And yet, many sections of a Website are clearly not intended for search engine indexing Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have come together to post details of how each of them support robots.txt and the robots meta tag, all part of the Robots Exclusion Proocol (REP) which is a method of controlling what is off-limits to the webcrawlers. While the engines' posts use terms like “collaboration” and “working together”, they haven’t gone as far as joining together to implement a new standard (as they did with sitemaps.org). Rather, the parties have identified a core set of robots.txt and robots meta tag directives that all three engines support: Google and Yahoo! already supported and documented each of the core directives and Microsoft supported most of them before the announcement. In their posts, they also list the directives they support that may not be supported by the other engines. For robots.txt, all three engines support: * Disallow * Allow * Use of wildcards * Sitemap location For robots meta tags, all three engines support: * noindex * nofollow * noarchive * nosnippet * noodpt With this announcement, Microsoft appears to be adding support for the use of * wildcards (which will go live later this month) and the Allow directive. The biggest discrepancy is with the crawl-delay directive. Yahoo! and Microsoft support it, while Google does not (although Google does support control of crawl speed via Webmaster Tools ). Matt Cutts suggests a nifty little booklet about robots.txt for publishers. "This PDF is perfect for regular folks that don’t live and breathe search 24 hours a day," says the Google guy.
In the inaugural session of SMX Developer Day, entitled "Diagnosing Site Architecture?" a slew of great tools was offered up by Jonathan Hochman for quickly homing in on structural strengths, weaknesses, buttresses and other elements that can lead to the build up or collapse of search engine supremacy. NoScript: When this tool is activated, it blocks all client side scripts like JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Silverlight. So you can safely view pages in the raw to see what they look like without scripted support, including those with malicious code. Get a picture of what your pages look like to bots. And confirm that your content is accessible. Googlebar (Not Google Toolbar): A view of Google's cached pages in one click. Googlebar highlights the search terms on the page. You can also run any Google search from this toolbar. <http://googlebar.mozdev.org/> Live HTTP Headers: Understand the status codes your pages are reporting to make sure they are "200" AOK. Expose redirects, debug, and more! <http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/> SWFobject: Not a tool, per say, but a resource that has become the" Flash Optimization Solution. It's part of Google Code so it's okay to use. Xenu Link Sleuth: This free spider crawls href links just like search engine bots and generates a list of broken links as well as a site map using each page's Title tag. Use the site map to look for missing pages, bad titles and duplicate content. You can also check for broken links before deployment. <http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html> FireFox Web Developer: This tool lets you disable/enable JavaScript. Report JavaScript errors. Disable CSS. Edit CSS or HTML. View alt attributes on images. Look for missing or inaccurate Alt attributes. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60>
In the ongoing saga of Microhoo, or Microhoogle if you count all three players, two major announcements have been made amidst the rumors and the ever-present speculation. First up, Yahoo has set an August 1, 2008 date for its postponed shareholders meeting. That gives them almost two months to ready the troops to fight Icahn's proxy board. And Jerry Yang has more reason than ever to fight and fight hard. Carl Icahn has announced that he wants Yang out as CEO of Yahoo. The news came in the wake of unsealed court documents claiming Yang had not given serious consideration to Microsoft's offer.
Yahoo Search is taking even more steps to get the monkey off of its back, the SearchMonkey that is. A new Yahoo SearchMonkey Gallery has launched in public beta to give Yahoo users the options of customizing search results with applications built by third party publishers. SearchMonkey apps go far beyond the Facebook-type zombie and sheep novelties that have caused so much eye rolling. Beta apps already tie useful information from sites like Yelp, Last.fm, and WebMD into Yahoo's search results. As posted on the Yahoo Search Blog: The Search Gallery is still in beta, but there are already a number of really useful apps included. We expect the number and variety of apps to grow significantly with time. <http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/>
Searchme, which bears a strong resemblance to the Apple interface made popular in Cover Flow, lets you see what you're searching for as you type. Enter a query term and then choose a category and you'll see pictures of Web pages that answer your search. You can review these pages quickly to find just the information you're looking for *before * you click through. An impressive group of VC’s have plunked down $43.6 Million to date on the service. It could turn out to be the Apple of their eye, and yours, too!
A great resource mentioned in the SMX Advanced Session titled "Analytics Every SEO Needs to Know," is SEOMeter, a crawl frequency measurement tool. Crawl frequency is a useful metric for you to monitor and record for diagnostic purposes. A short Crawl Cycle (CC) usually means that the Website is "trusted" by search engines, and this trust, in turn, is reflected on the website's search engine ranking. Not only will your crawl data report show your canonical URL of preference, it can actually replace Google's Supplemental Index by informing you know which pages on your site are no longer considered "compelling" so you can turn things around. What governs crawl frequency? - The number and quality of inbound links SEOmeter.com offers a convenient online SEO tool that allows webmasters to monitor their website' crawling activities, and to collate crawling trend against their ongoing marketing campaign and other SEO strategies.
Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox and for Internet Explorer, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.
Google Earth has created a 3D tour of Walt Disney World’s 4 theme parks and 22 hotels and resorts. If you have kids, here's the must-see site: <http://www.disneyworld.com/3dparks> . Google Earth 4.3 users can see Walt Disney World Resort in 3D by enabling the “Gallery” folder within Google Earth, or by selecting any of the 3D buildings within the resort. “You know the phrase ‘next best thing to being there’? Walt Disney World Resort in 3D is going to deliver on that,” said Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, in a statement. “Guests and travel planners can now explore our world with just a few clicks of a mouse, and they can book vacations while being immersed in what the destination has to offer.” Disney’s digital mapping project, Walt Disney World Resort in 3D, hopes to become the ultimate online travel guide for Walt Disney World Resort, integrating the Google Earth 3D experience with the planning features of Disney.com.
Social media — blogging, social networking and creation of digital material — is central to many teenager’s lives. 93% of US teens use the internet and 39% of online teens share their own creations online: Photos, stories, videos and more. This number is up from 33% in 2004. These numbers are from the report “Teens and Social Media” from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. And the report holds other numbers of interest to many of Pandia’s readers: Educators, marketers, librarians. 28% of online teens have created their own blog (up from 19% in 2004) and 27% maintain their own web page. Girls lead the charge in the teen blogosphere: 35% of teenage girls blog, compared with 20% of the boys. Most of the growth in teenage blogging from 2004 to 2007 is attributable to the increased activity of girls. About 55% of American online teens have profiles on a social network site. But they do more than just maintain their profile: 70% read the blogs of others and 76% have commented on a friend’s blog post or social network item. While the boys are not the most avid bloggers, they are more likely to upload videos to video sharing sites. Boys are twice as likely to upload videos as girls. Digital images, both stills and videos, play an important part in teens’ social networking. 89% say that they receive comments on the items they post online. And this practice isn’t limited to images and videos. 76% say they comment on the blog posts of others. These comments often turn into conversations, making this more than the online exhibitionism that teens are often accused of. This is real social networking where the contributors learn to know each other and learn from each other. This is emphasized by the fact that few teens who upload photos share them without restrictions. Far more cautious than adults, only 21% of teens say they never restrict access to the images they upload. The number for adults is twice that: 42%. What can we learn from these numbers? For one thing, it seems the rate of contribution of content online is set to rise. In 2006 Jakob Nielsen found that in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. These numbers certainly don’t hold true for teenagers, who seem to be set to conquer the web as they grow up. The numbers from Pew also indicate that teens are serious about their online presence, making acquaintances, building relationships and taking care both to contribute and to protect their contributions. Even though much of their online activity is for fun, teens don’t take it lightly. <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Social_Media_Final.pdf>
As Google continues to organize the world's information, the ability to summon it to your desktop, making you all-knowing and all-seeing, is of ever increasing import. To learn how to fine tune your searches with boolean operators, narrow down your searches to the "site," "link," "cache" or "inurl level" (among others), turn Google into a calculator or a handy conversion utility, or simply find the secrets of the universe, the crib sheet at makeuseof.com should help. Make use of the info at: <http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/master-the-google-search-like-a-god-save-time/>
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