Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category
Yahoo Acquires Ad Network BlueLithim
This afternoon Yahoo announced that it was buying US-based ad network BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. Founded in 2004 the company has 10 offices globally and claims more unique US visitors than Google, MSN, AOL and eBay. It also claims to be the fifth largest US ad network and the second largest in the UK. It’s part of Yahoo’s push to create “the largest and most effective online ad network globally.” That network includes the recently acquired RightMedia Exchange. The company will apparently operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo and will report into Hilary Schneider’s new organization.
Most of what BlueLithium does is behavioral or demographic targeting, which has recently seen a big push by Yahoo via its new SmartAds platform. This acquisition can be seen as partly defensive and partly offensive in an effort to retain brand advertisers that have more choices today and to build out a broad and efficient online ad network that offers huge reach (incl. beyond Yahoo), as well as targeting and search.
Not long ago AOL acquired BT ad network Tacoda.
Source:searchengineland.com
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Outward Links Can Kill Search Engine Rankings
Link building strategies have, for most people for a long time, revolved around reciprocal link exchanges. Whilst most people understand that links are important, they generally don’t understand why this is so. In a nutshell, a link to your site has traditionally been accepted by Search Engines as a vote for your site. A link from a topic or theme-related site to yours is better than a link from a site having a completely different topic. An important site’s link to yours carries more weight – for example from The Open Directory, or Yahoo Directory. All pretty straightforward…
BUT… the rules have changed… significantly! All the thinking webmasters worked diligently to build links – willy-nilly – in order to subvert the search engine rankings and gain an advantage to themselves at the expense of everyone else. For a long time, there have been mutterings about this, and comments from Google staffers about possible penalties from linking to “bad neighbourhoods’” and – heaven forbid it – buying links! Google et al simply don’t approve of willy-nilly link-building schemes, and have recently tightened the screws a bit more, in two notable ways…
Bad Links
Some links are bad… for example, if you are a car sales company and you’ve got dozens of completely irrelevant links to international hotel sites… yeah, YOU know the ones! in Prague, Munich, Shanghai etc! That’s a BAD neighbourhood over there! That IS going to put a world of hurt on you! And as for the Free-For-All link sites, web rings, and 3 way link schemes… that’s just suicide in cyberspace! Why? Coz its a blatant and completely indefensible attempt at cheating the system!
Reciprocal Links – Almost a Waste of Effort
Reciprocal links are still of some value, providing the link titles are explicit, and if the page they link to you from has a higher Page Rank than the page from which you link to them. The concept of a link to you being a vote for you, and being added to your site’s Total Vote Count has a flip side. A link from you to someone else essentially deducts one vote from your total vote count… meaning its value is minimal when compared to a 1-way incoming back-link!
1-Way Outward Links Are Toxic
Ok, lets assume you are a service provider, maybe a health clinic, and you deal with hospitals, other doctors, specialists, nurses, laboratories. So, as a benefit to your visitors, you place direct links to their web resources on your links page. Is that clever?
Most certainly it is NOT! Transfusion time, because you’ll be haemorrhaging Page Rank with nothing in return! Do it, but be smart about it, because there is NOTHING to be gained (by you) from linking to any site that does not link back. So make sure your links include the “nofollow” attribute that tells SE’s that the link is NOT a vote by your site for that site!
Link Content Is Mission Critical
This is mission critical because Google and others have decided that they can’t trust you to be honest about your site! Basically, it seems like there are two web tribes – those who know not so much about how things work, and those who know more than they should. There should also be a flourishing third tribe, who just build great sites with lots of terrific content that automatically ranks highly – but nobody’s seen nuthin’ from those guys for ages!
The tribe who know more than they should ruthlessly manipulate every available loophole to dominate search engine rankings, at the expense of those who have yet to read SEO For Dummies. Therefore, Google decided that its essential that there is some external correlation between what YOU say your site is about, and what OTHER people say your site is about… This is done by analysing the words in the Link Title on all links pointing to your site. Bottom line here is – if a keyword phrase does NOT appear on links to your site, you ain’t gonna rank for that phrase!
For many established sites, this is the main reason they might have experienced a noticeable decline in rankings in the last few months. Most older sites will have a majority of incoming links based on their business name, and NOT on their activities / products / services / location etc. To use the common “widgets” analogy – if you are selling “widgets” and all your incoming link Titles have only your business name e.g. Smiths Manufacturing Co Ltd, it’s now very difficult for you to rank for “widgets”!
Backlink analysis reveals this shortcoming rather quickly and, lucky for you, it is possible to remedy this by building 1-way incoming back-links using multiple Title / Description combinations that contain a good spread of relevant keywords. It does require some keyword research, and it is tedious – but if you don’t do it, you are certainly not going forwards! But your competitors might be…
Source: The SEO Guys Blog
Social Media and Search Rankings
Over the past few years, the Internet has increasingly become a participatory social network where user-generated content is just as important as traditional advertising messages. This means your articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other comments on the Web are now critical sources of information about your company, your products and services. This phenomenon has given consumers a voice and weakened the power formerly held by advertising media. Social media, therefore, becomes increasingly important to a Web site’s success and its visibility in search engines.
Not long ago, search engine optimization focused on fine-tuning your on- and off-page Web site elements in order to achieve better rankings in the search engines. While on-page elements remain the fundamental building blocks of your SEO campaign, it is no longer the entirety of the puzzle. With the rise of social media, it is more important than ever to create and optimize many different types of content in order to dominate the SERPs. The Ãncrease in user-generated content, and implementation of Google search personalization and universal search, has helped bring this about.
Search Personalization
In personalized search, individual user search results are reordered based on their previous search behavior and other indicators. Pages can move up or down based on the influence of a user’s Google home page content, bookmarks, search history, Web history, etc. While Google is the only search engine currently adjusting rankings using personalization factors, Yahoo and Ask have variations on this theme with MyWeb and MyStuff.
Google’s reasons for initiating search personalization are that it delivers more relevant results and can reduce sp@m. Others have challenged this rationale, stating that user interests are not static and can vary by season, mood or other factors. It’s also difficult to know user intent based on clÃck behavior, as sometimes when people clÃck on a link they’ll immediately realize this wasn’t what they wanted and clÃck off. Queries can also be hit and miss, landing users on non-relevant sites which would then be used in creating non-relevant future results for that user.
Because of personalized search, optimization techniques will change, requiring more intense multivariate analyses in the competitor landscape since the leading competitors will vary as the SERPs vary. This will affect analyses of competitor on-page and off-page factors, especially keyword analysis. However, all the basic optimization tactics remain important. Content, in particular, must do a better job of telling search engines what the page is about, and this will result in better rankings for those able to do so.
Universal Search
With the advent of universal search by Google and others, search marketers and site owners will soon find it necessary to optimize their Web sites for a broad range of content types. This means creating content in every media and vertical niche applicable to your brand. Compelling, useful and widely propagated content will create more search visibility and Web site success.
Fresh content will bring repeat visitors and Ãncrease the odds that other users and Web site owners will want to share your content with their visitors, creating more backlinks. For most brands, the benefit of encouraging social networking activities is increased search visibility.
Search engine optimization techniques vary depending on the type of content being optimized. We’ve written before about optimizing content for Google image search, video search, news, maps and blog search. Two other areas you can optimize content for are podcasts and your Google Base data feeds.
Optimizing Podcasts
To create a podcast, you must record an audio file to be uploaded to the Web. Once uploaded, users will be able to download this rich media file and listen to it via an iPod or some other media player.
Up until recently, multimedia search engines relied on metadata to determine relevancy of rich media files. However, this was insufficient for finding relevant podcasts because the average podcast is 15 to 20 minutes long and has only 25 to 30 words describing it.
Currently, speech recognition technology is used to determine the relevancy of audio files. Speech recognition and extracting podcast content is essential for indexing content and making it findable by users. One way to do this is to play audio snippets to determine the relevancy of the terms within a podcast.
When optimizing your podcast ensure your content is easily found by promoting only one feed. Optimize the audio file, and then optimize a landing page for each episode in addition to your category page. Make your subscription information visible on landing pages. Create valid feeds and validate them with a feed validator tool such as FeedValidator.orgW3C Feed Validator. or the
Your podcast should have a unique, keyword-rich Title tag explaining the subject matter. The landing page should contain a link back to your Web site. The publication date is important. This tag specifies the last time the feed was updated. Include image tags if applicable.
Since iTunes does not redistribute, we recommend building a separate feed for iTunes. You can promote with three separate feeds, a media feed, a 2.0 feed and an iTunes feed. Include a transcript or a summary of the podcast on the landing page, depending on the podcast length. If it is brief, only a summary reviewing the main points is necessary.
Optimizing Google Base Data Feeds
Google Base is a database where you can upload all kinds of online and offline content for sale. Your items will include labels and attributes to help describe the content you are uploading, making it searchable for users. Attributes are the words that describe the characteristics of your items. You can enter multiple values separated by commas for any given attribute. Labels are keywords that can be used to classify or describe your item, such as products, services, and even a house for sale.
The items you submit to Google Base will go in the Base directory, and some items, depending on relevance, might also go into the Google SERPs, Froogle or Google Maps. So the quality of your data is important if you want it to be found far and wide.
Use Google Base custom attributes to optimize your feeds. Google Base allows you to specify your own custom attributes, which means you can include additional information about your items. UnlÃmited custom attributes can be included in your tab-delimited bulk upload file. Detailed descriptions can make your items more relevant, getting them into the Google index and other vertical databases, providing more opportunÃty for them to be found.
Since many of those uploading their data feeds to Google Base don’t know about the custom attributes feature, you would gain a significant advantage because your feeds will be more successful than those of your competitors.
Another way to gain competitive advantage is to completely automate your Google Base data feeds. By automating your feeds, you ensure that the information uploaded to Google Base is up-to-date and accurate.
Automate your Google Base data feed by connecting it directly with your database with a process that pulls the most recent data once a day, submitting a new bulk upload to Google Base on a regular basis. Outsourcing this task takes about one day’s time for setup, and then it becomes automated. One resource for such e-marketing services is Hudson’s Horizons.
Though the fundamentals remain the same, search engine optimization is an ever evolving industry, adapting as the search landscape continues to change. It is now important to create and optimize many different types of content to dominate the SERPs. Optimizing your podcasts and Google Base data feeds will go a long way toward expanding search visibility.
An article taken from an email of sitepronews written by By Susan Esparza
Spocking your profile
Yes, Its here…
I got a sneak preview or you can say a requested invitation to spock…..
So what is spock.
First I thought its a simple search engine but then when you cant be always 100% right… Its a people search engine……
this is what the about us page says…. and i believe in it
“Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.”
You can search for people by their name or enter some keywords that is most likely and relevant to show up people with those popular tags. Check out their homepage
So you search for my name and you will find websites, tags and information about me. Its that simple I think it will make people searching easier but still think about lakhs of people with the same name what about them how to search and find information about them.Just searching for the name John turned up 2000000 pages and is sorted by popularity so the first 2 people that topped was Donald Trump (Donald John Trump Sr.) then came John F. Kennedy And it carried relevant information about those two people
Sp youve got to be really famous to get to the top ten…. It would be easy for me i hope…. Cos Ive got less competition for the name Rochit…
.
It does take time to search.. still not that fast as google……. (Yea google is a benchmark)
So i searched for aishwarya… no… only 46 results so to make it a little intersting i searched for shahrukh still no shahrukh khan here at top slot only 95 results.
Searching for rahul gave me numbers of 5046, aha ! So how do you zero in on the person you want to search for….. Advanced search… It has option of age group, Gender, Tags, location and picture… So it cn help you to search for a person to a particular extent…….

but still waiting for a major innovation is the most likely i am going to do………….
Yea so how do you get popular on this website… No SEO here its PEO (People engine optimization. as a registered member you can add relevant and interesting tags to people’s profiles, vote tags up to make them rank higher, or vote them down to make them rank lower, or disappear.
You can keep track of the people you are interested in by adding them to your favorites… And if you profile is already there you claim of the profile tht its yours…..
So how to monetize ?? Something similar to googles sponsored results is in the pipeline uit seems bcos tht can be a very good option… So if a person searches for Angelina Jolie The sponsored results could be About movies, Movie review website, Latest movies etc etc……
All of us know a major chunk of top searches on google is for people or for events linked to people.. So search engine specifically for people can work….
So how do you get included to spock. Request an invitation or get a invitation from me.. If you need invitation do comment and i can send you a invitation…..
So how to start the inclusion process

It will ask for the relevant login information of the service you use so that it can find related people for your account then

Then you can edit your profile accordingly…….. adding tags relevant websites , related people etc.. Something of little bit social networking + search engine…

Just see how far things can go….. Check out spock….
bye…
