When Yahoo and Microsoft announced their Search Alliance in July 2009, only the high level agreement details were available:

• Microsoft will provide the development and management of search engine results technology (bing)
• Microsoft will provide the search and content network ad platform (adCenter)
• Microsoft will manage the relationship with self-service advertisers
• Yahoo will mange the relationship with large accounts
• Yahoo will provide their own user interface on top of the Bing results which will appear on Yahoo properties

Now that US and EU regulators have approved the deal, search marketers need to assess which Yahoo tools they rely on – and need to be prepared with alternatives should these tools be discontinued.

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One problem search engines face when indexing and ranking a website’s content is to identify the target geographic and linguistic market a particular website page is trying to reach. The world wide web is indeed that, and the issue is particularly complicated for websites in languages which have a broad geographic reach such as English and Spanish.

Fortunately for site owners, there are clues search engines use to match website content with searcher location. By understanding these clues and user behavior, site owners can choose a domain and URL strategy which best fits their needs.

I discussed domain and URL strategies at the SMX West 2010 Search Marketing Expo conference. For the benefit of those who couldn’t attend, the slides and a rough transcript follow. I’d strongly recommend that you attend a future SMX conference in person – from search marketing tips to great networking (and fine food), you won’t regret it.

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With the approval of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal by EU regulators, search engine marketers will soon be working in a new landscape. In western Europe where Google dominates with about 90% of the market, it’s tempting to react to the deal with a big yawn.

Yet Yahoo! often has a bigger impact on our search marking than we might like to acknowledge. For many, Yahoo, through its Site Explorer and the Yahoo Search Boss / Site Explorer APIs , is a primary source of competitive backlink data. And who among us doesn’t perform a few searches in Yahoo to benchmark the quality of Google’s results?

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Google’s very undiplomatic announcement that it is going to stop censoring its search results in China doesn’t leave much face-saving wiggle room for the Chinese government – a big no-no in Asian culture. Significant blocking of Google in China seems imminent – you don’t go to great lengths to build the great firewall of China for nothing. Google, a data-driven company, knows full well that Chinese users will be discouraged from using a search engine if it is slow or worse, unreachable. Game over as they say.

While it is easy to applaud Google for taking the moral high ground, you almost get the feeling that something else is happening: Google has given up its battle for search engine supremacy in China. Perhaps Google is giving up the fight because China is one of the few markets where local players, like Baidu, command more market share, regardless of who is doing the counting.

While the political repercussions will be interesting to watch, I’m also very curious to see how Microsoft responds. With its Bing, Microsoft seems to have finally put Google in its sights. Will Microsoft try to fill the void left by Google’s virtual departure? Or will Microsoft take a moral stance? Interesting…

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When Yahoo announced their effective exit from the search engine business last July, the main points seemed clear:

• Microsoft will provide the development and management of search engine results technology
• Microsoft will provide the search and content network ad platform
• Microsoft will manage the relationship with all but an elite group of advertisers
• Yahoo will provide their own user interface on top of Microsoft’s Bing data

The Bing-Yahoo agreement, should it receive the necessary anti-trust approvals, may have a wider impact on web marketers (as a side note, I believe the agreement is a bad thing as it reduces competition in this strategic market). Consider the uncertainty surrounding just two of the web marketing tools currently provided by Yahoo:

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Yesterday we saw a lot of press and blogosphere attention devoted to deals being made between the two leading search engines, Google and Bing, and leading social media services Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter search deals, while interesting, doesn’t yet merit much beyond a big yawn – we’ve already had decent, if imperfect, search via Summize, which became twitter search. Sure, both Google and Bing can improve this, but still, things like Google Squared are much more innovative.

What is really interesting about the search engine deals are the implications of the business details:

Is twitter being compensated for the indexing and retrieval attention Bing (and Google?) is giving them?

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At the end of May Microsoft announced its new search engine, Bing. Microsoft justified many of Bing’s new features by noting that 50% of search queries are either abandoned or refined – users aren’t getting the right answer on the first try, citing studies by Jakob Nielsen, Enquiro and internal testing. Microsoft also said that searchers are becoming more focused more on tasks and decisions – consequently search engine sessions are becoming longer as users work their way through their decision making process.

As data from Bing’s first full month becomes available, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at what the Bing rollout means for search marketers and, in a separate article, current search engine market shares.

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At the end of May Microsoft announced its new search engine, Bing. As data from Bing’s first full month becomes available, I thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at the current market share enjoyed by the major search engines in the US and a “typical” European market, Italy. The real test of Bing’s success will to be to check back in a few months to see if Bing has picked up traction with users or not. As the folks from Cuil can attest, a burst of publicity doesn’t necessary translate into loyal search users.

Search Engine statistics, USA vs. Italy

Most web intelligence services are currently US centric with very little worldwide reach. Unless stated otherwise, the data which follows is for the US market. Where available, I’ve also provided data for the Italian market, which for search engine usage is rather typical of most west European markets.

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It was bound to happen. In an economic climate of belt tightening, Microsoft has finally done the unthinkable. First there were those 5,000 layoffs. Then there was the abandonment of adCenter Analytics, Microsoft’s web analytics solution. Yesterday Microsoft announced it was discontinuing Encarta, tacit acknowledgment that it has been trumped by Wikipedia.

So perhaps I should have seen the writing on the wall. Yet today’s announcement that Microsoft is abandoning it’s Live Search took me by surprise. Is Yahoo! next? Will we soon be looking at a Google only world?

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In three short years ¹ Google Analytics has become an important tool for many companies looking to get more out of their presence on the web. Google Analytics’ wide range of website reports, from traffic sources to conversion rates, provide invaluable insight into a site’s business performance for an initial cost which is difficult to beat.

One particular report, the Search Engine report, is of particular interest to companies looking to optimize their organic search engine marketing activity. This report identifies sources of search traffic that brought visitors to the website.

For each search engine source, a drill-down feature shows the keywords people used – the very keywords which express a visitor’s intent as they came to your website.

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At a recent Legal Marketing Italia seminar, the question arose as to why a company’s web site doesn’t rank well, even for the company’s name. In Italy, the most common problem encountered with websites is the use of Macromedia / Adobe Flash to develop most or all of a company’s website. This case was no exception.

Update: Google has announced improved crawling support for Flash sites. Our related article Why Flash is still bad for SEO and the Web explains that nothing has changed – the best websites should still avoid Flash. (2 July 2008)

Italy has a strong history of excellence in visual communication, including graphic design. Indeed, the very successful New York City subway signage was designed by an Italian. Many Italian graphic designers have worked on web sites, adopting Flash as their preferred technology when moving from the printed media to the web. Flash allows “pixel perfect” control over web design, including font specification.

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While it may seem paradoxical, there are many occasions where you may want to exclude a website or portion of a site from search engine crawling and indexing. One typical need is to keep duplicate content, such as printer friendly versions, out of a search engine’s index. The same is true for pages available both in HTML and PDF or word processor formats. Other examples include site “service pages” such as user friendly error message and activity confirmation pages. Special considerations apply for ad campaign landing pages.

There are several ways to prevent Google, Yahoo!, Bing or Ask from indexing a site’s pages. In this article, we look at the different search engine blocking methods, considering each method’s pros and cons.

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Each of the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Live Search) have announced joint support of Google’s sitemaps protocol.

2007-04-11: Ask announces support of the sitemap standard. It is not yet clear if they actually use sitemaps. While Google and Yahoo do process sitemaps, Microsoft does not yet use them.

A new site, www.sitemaps.org, has been created to support the sitemaps protocol. While the Yahoo blog indicates Yahoo is apparently already accepting submissions, there is not mention of this on their Site Explorer submission form. Microsoft is committed to supporting sitemaps after finishing internal testing which is currently underway.

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Google Labs has launched a new search tool, Google Trends. It displays relative search volumes over time (from 2004 onward) for a set of user defined keywords and keyword phrases. Google Trends joins Google Zeitgeist, a static snapshot of top search trends.

In some cases, news events are presented with the search volume, providing insight into the events driving spikes in user searches. Try a search on google, yahoo, bing and ask to see how this works. If the data is accurate, Italy is second only to the UK in searches for Viagra.

While the possibilities are very interesting, a clear disclaimer warns:

It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.

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