The links to Yahoo! and MapQuest maps which were once on Google have been removed by the search engine major. Earlier search for addresses or locations would give you choice between Google, Yahoo! and MapQuest maps but now there is only Google Maps.
For the move Google responded:
SEMPO or Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has opened its 2006 survey centering around the condition of search engine marketing all over the world. This year the survey will have participants from Europe. Search marketers who are not the members of SEMPO can also attend it. The survey will be beneficial for all the participants as they can get an insight into the past and future growth of the industry and the trend it will take in future. SEMPO has given the reasons to participate in the survey:
According to a discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums, Google's quality score plays an important role in ad delivery. A member has posted a response from Google which he got after seeing uneven delivery of ads when the Google’s Ad Optimizer was turned off.
According to the mail:
The share of Google in search market in the United States has gone up by 0.4% taking its share to 47.4% as of December 2006. This has been reported by comScore Networks. Yahoo! has also been the gainer seeing an increase of 0.3% which makes it share stand at 28.5%. While Yahoo! and Google are gainers there are some losers also in the form of Microsoft and Ask.com. Microsoft's share saw a decline of 0.5 % bringing down its share to 10.5% and Ask.com's share is at 5.4% after a fall of 0.1%. In December there were around 6.7 billion searches by the web users of US. 3.2 billion searches were done on Google sites and 1.9 billion searches on Yahoo!.
Online encyclopedia major Wikipedia has launched a new Wiki search engine called Wikiseek. You can better search Wikipedia with this search engine. There are AdSense ads on it too.
The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes. Wikiseek utilizes Searchme's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.
All the webmasters who do not care to follow the rules of Google can expect to hear directly from the company. Google has been sending notifications to the webmasters for not adhering to the rules of the company. One such notification has been posted at Search Engine RoundTable Forums by a webmaster who was hiding text by mistake. The mail reads:
Dear site owner or webmaster of *******co.uk,
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently
pages from *****.co.uk are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.
Seems like a dangerous hacker is on the prowl. Some SEO blogs have been hacked including Graywolf's SEO Blog and Stuntdubl. The hacker has an account at WordPress which has been closed now.
The hacker also writes
My name is XXX. I am XXX years old, I live in XXX and I’m what some people might call a “computer geek”.
Last week there were some comments by ShoeMoney about SEO which did not go down well with some. ShoeMoney has posted another post asking to vote for 'Most Important Seo Factor '. It has listed four SEO aspects:
Everyone want to increase their click in Google AdWords. ShoeMoney has given a simple eye tracking trick of aligning the keyterms in Google AdWords ad copy by which the clicks have increased by 25%. The post reads “I think the most important thing is your CTR (click through ratio). There are tricks you can learn to increase this that really have nothing to do with even your ad copy. If you are in the USA and search Google for “shoemoney” you will see this:
Blogs offer a number of useful functions such as trackbacks, comments, and RSS. Thus blog optimization becomes a useful part of search marketing. Blog software can help in improving the rankings of a site as it can manage particular type of content like post FAQ, give product updates and provide an online media room.
There are category features in blog software which can lead to assemblage of content according to themes. Thus making it simpler to algorithmically categorize content. Your site can get good ranks for those topics if the search engines can easily understand your content. Search engine spiders can easily find and crawl blog content as most blog softwares give simple URL structure. In short blogs can bring more traffic and can be a helpful site optimization tool.
@pagetraffic
