MarketingSherpa has been bought by MarketingExperiments. This news was made public by an announcement by MarketingExperiments . However the two companies will work as close partners though functioning separately. They will continue to offer networking summits, marketing professionals, practical research and professional training. In Note to Readers by Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa said, “Nothing drastic will change. We're keeping our same name, our staff, our regular publications, and yes, our Warren, RI, headquarters. And our goal remains the same — to conduct new research into what really works in marketing via Case Studies, Benchmark Guides & Summits. Plus, now our research for you will be supplemented by the team at MEC Labs Group.”
Industry News
Amazon have launched PPC ads for Amazon.com. The new program is named Clickriver Ads and is powered by their A9.com. “What is Clickriver Ads? Clickriver Ads is an advertising program — currently in beta — that allows businesses to place sponsored links on Amazon.com®, next to search results and on product detail pages. Clickriver Ads presents a unique opportunity to advertise services and products that complement the selection on Amazon.com, an online marketplace with tens of millions of active customer accounts.”
Apparently, Digg.com has made modifications in its algorithms. With the changed algorithms it is now harder to be on Digg homepage. Neil Patel, at Pronet Advertising writes previously, a story required 20 to 40 diggs to reach the homepage. However, now a story requires at least 60 diggs to reach the front page. Neil cites some possibilities for this change:
* Too many stories were being submitted and reaching the front page.
* Too many "friends" were digging each others diggs.
* The quality of stories hitting the front page was decreasing.
A SEO Speedwagon member reported about how to get more index count at Yahoo!. Now submitting sitemap feeds to Yahoo in default Google feed file format sitemap.xml can increase the index count by triple. Exporting sitemap.xml file directly to urllist.txt. which is recommended file format by Yahoo! can create a bloat. Google sitemap.xml file have many URLs which you won't like to get crawled. Using urllist.txt format led to listing of incidental graphics files in crawling list and increasing the file size. It is better to submit feed in sitemap.xml.
According to Reuters Ask.com has signed a search deal with Lycos , for powering their search ads and search engine. Under the agreement Lycos Network will get image search, Web search, ppc ads and zoom search from Ask.com.
For the deal Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com said, “Ask.com has worked very hard to develop one of a kind search technology and search features that help users get the information they want more quickly.
Halloween, on 31st October was celebrated in style by various search engines. The four search engines Yahoo!, Google, Dogpile and Ask.com, had fancy and scary Halloween logos. Screen shots of their logos tell the whole story. Most interesting was that of Ask.com which changed its whole background for Halloween.
Webmaster World conference, PubCon Vegas 2006 is slated to be the biggest ever PubCon. Conference which will take place from 14th to 17th November in Las Vegas will feature names of such experts like Greg Boser, Matt Cutts, Todd Friesen, John Battelle, and Tim Mayer. There will be more experts from whom you can gain more knowledge about search engine marketing and search engines. With more than 115 speakers conference will have no less than 40 sessions. Brett Tabke of Webmaster World said “We waste no time getting it started with a Keynote by Guy Kawasaki. That’s followed by the first of the sessions including speakers from Digg, FeedBurner, Yahoo, Google, AOL, Opera, and Ebay’s Shopping.com, and an afternoon keynote with Opera’s Jon Von Tetzchner. There are more afternoon sessions until we wind up Tuesday with a free cocktail reception.” Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conferences will be a part of this grand event. The name 'Pub conference' for conference series was given by Pandia.
AOL has launched a new service known as ' AOL Search with FullView '. This search interface will automatically integrate local, multimedia, news and other kinds of content with Google-powered web search results. This service can be used by AOL Search, MapQuest, AOL.com and clients of AOL. FullView will help searchers in finding more information concerning to their searches. Searches will have images, videos, local results and other specific information.
Second Life has given online marketing and optimization new dimension, seeing the amount of business being done in this virtual reality platform. Created in 2003 Second Life currently has no less than 800,000 denizens. Many denizens are offering range of services such as architecture, selling artworks, scripting, event planning, legal and financial services. People are earning hundreds of dollars through designing and selling Second Life virtual real estate. They are also selling weaponry , jewelery, clothes, pets. Musicians like Suzanne Vega and Duran Duran have conducted virtual concerts in Second Life space through utilizing their lifelike characters. Organizations like American Apparel Inc, Major League Baseball, Cnet.com, and Harvard University are not behind in using this new media. Everyday business worth thousands of dollars is done on it. It is estimated that annual GDP of Second Life comes around $150 million.
Apart from Google two other companies are offering customized search engines. These are Microsoft and Optevi. Microsoft in March had launched a live search feature 'Search Macros'. Search Macros helps in building an advanced search query. These search queries are then stored in search bar for later use. Advanced query strings helps you to keep out particular sites, search for certain page characteristics as well as you can also prioritize some sites. Users can create their own Macros. On Optevi, visitors have option of either creating or choosing from 'bundle' of sites which in turn affect the search results. The inclusion and ranking of sites are affected by selection made by the users. To learn more about Optevi search you can have 'The Optevi tour'.
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