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China Central Television (CCTV), the largest state-owned television network in China, recently ran a report accusing Baidu of questionable practices regarding medical search advertising. The accusations suggest that Baidu was allowing non-licensed medical companies to advertise while preventing some of the licensed ones from bidding on popular medical terms.

Baidu engaged in talks with CCTV to learn more about their accusations. They also removed paid search listings of medical companies who did not have proper licensing on file with Baidu.

Baidu maintains that they do not prevent the licensed companies from advertising. Advertising by medical companies makes up about 10-15% of Baidu’s revenue.

Of course, this is not the first time that state entities in China have caused unnecessary, undemocratic problems for Baidu.

Related Reading:
Baidu’s Profit Increases 91% in Third Quarter 2008

Many major companies continue to make mistakes with their Web sites that hurt their search engine rankings. They target pages in the wrong way, or don’t craft their pages in a way to prevent searchers from leaving their site after the first page. In today’s enterprise search marketing column, “SEO Dreams are Made of This,” Aaron Shear says it’s time for some SEO dreaming.

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RingCentral Virtual Phone System

links for 2008-11-16

Multi Level Network Maketing Defined

Walmart Sends DMCA Notice to SearchAllDeals, TechCrunch

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Yahoo! has announced that Jerry Yang will step down as CEO once his replacement has been found. Yang will remain on board as Chief Yahoo!

Yang became CEO in June 2007 at the request of the Board of Directors. Board Chairman Roy Bostock will lead the search for a new CEO. Here’s his official corporate-speak on the matter:

“Over the past year and a half, despite extraordinary challenges and distractions, Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! on an open platform model as well as the improved alignment of costs and revenues. Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board.”

AOL’s ad network, Platform-A, is going on tour. The 5-city event begins in New York City on November 17th at the American Museum of Natural History. The next stop will be Atlanta on November 20.

The tour will break for the holidays before hitting Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in 2009.

“AOL has one of the largest, most diverse and most engaged audiences on the Web, and combined with Platform-A’s industry-leading technologies, we can offer advertisers a unique combination of scale, integrated branding, and advanced targeting capabilities to enable them to deliver their branding messages in an effective, engaging and highly efficient way,” said Platform-A President Lynda Clarizio. “At a time when companies make sure that every penny spent on advertising counts, AOL delivers quality content and engaged consumers and Platform-A connects marketers to this audience to drive superior results.”

Related Reading:
AOL’s Platform-A Collaborates with T-mobile for 2 Day, Billion Impression Ad Blitz
AOL’s Platform-A Unveils Plans for Self-Service Ad Marketplace Exchange
AOL’s Platform-A Launches iPhone Advertising Solution

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) is planning to introduce a net neutrality bill in January, according to Reuters. President-elect Barack Obama has said he supports net neutrality, though it is not yet clear whether he backs Dorgan’s bill.

The bill would prevent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from blocking web content. Net neutrality supporters say some ISPs have blocked content because of concerns over the amount of bandwidth used by customers. Others have slowed downloading activities for the same reason.

Internet service provider AT&T told Reuters it would be crazy to block content because the customers would just jump ship to an ISP that doesn’t. Blocking content would be akin to shooting themselves in the foot.

Indeed, the bill would pit ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless and cable companies against content providers such as Google and Microsoft.

Yes, in Washington, enemies make the strangest bedfellows.

Related Reading:
Uncle Sam Says: Thumbs Down on Net Neutrality
Without Neutrality, What Happens to Search?

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There were lowered expectations for the 2008 Holiday shopping season before the bottom dropped out of the economy, but now it’s even worse. But you and your clients still have to make the best of things, so we’re here to help.

Search Engine Watch is offering a one-hour webcast, “How to Survive the Economic Meltdown & Succeed this Holiday Season,” taking place on Wednesday, November 19 at 1 p.m. EDT.

You’ll get some Holiday PPC campaign tips from Keith Hong, senior director of Clickable’s Assist and Customer Experience group (and former head of Ask.com customer management group). He’ll explain what you should already have done to prepare for success, and what you must do throughout the holiday season to adapt to volatile market and demand spikes. He’ll also offer some advice on how to stay calm and ensure success amidst this economic meltdown.

When times are tough, it’s even more important that you spend your marketing dollars efficiently. This SEW Webcast can help you learn how to do that.

Please sign up today.

Make the most out of these rocky economic times by utilizing your staff during idle time for online public relations. In today’s linkbuilding column, “Use Online Public Relations for Link Marketing,” Justilien Gaspard offers some ideas for things you can do to build links and increase sales simultaneously.

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The new Yahoo! front page went into testing a couple months ago. The redesign effort also coincides with the new user interface, YUI 3.

Here’s a peek:

Nicholas Zakas of the Yahoo! User Interface team expanded on the UI efforts by explaining the goals for the framework of YUI 3:

1. Eliminate global dependencies. We wanted each part of the page to operate separately from all of the others. Each part should have no knowledge of what else is on the page and therefore can’t depend on objects to be globally available. The 2.x library is based on the global YAHOO object, which we would have had to abstract away; the 3.x concept of YUI instances that could be individually manipulated worked perfectly to achieve this goal.
2. Make it small, make it fast. The Front Page can’t afford to be slow, so we needed to have as little code as possible to get everything up and running. YUI 3 impressed us with its organization into small, atomic units that allowed us to specifically include parts of the library that we wanted while eliminating parts that were unnecessary. Further, one of the goals of YUI 3 was to optimize for runtime execution and make it faster than the 2.x version. Once again, YUI 3’s approach was directly in line with the Front Page’s goals.
3. Create version independence. From the start, we didn’t want to have dependencies on specific versions of YUI components as this can lead to maintenance issues. What we really wanted was for each part of the page to be able to use whatever version of the components that they wanted. The sandboxing feature of YUI 3 opened up the possibility of having two (or more) YUI instances each loading different versions of various components while not interfering with each other.
4. Allow code portability. Having worked at Yahoo! for a combined five years, Steve and I knew that anything we put on a Yahoo! property could be a candidate for porting to someplace else. We knew that this possibility meant the code had to stand on its own and not make assumptions about the environment in which it was placed. We thought about the most difficult environment possible: a locked-down browser environment where the JavaScript code has no direct access to the DOM. Since YUI 3 can abstract away the DOM through its Node interface, we had the entrypoint necessary to make this requirement a reality.
5. Be forward compatible. The project to create a new Front Page is an incredibly long one and we wanted to be as forward-looking as possible. We knew that if we created the framework on YUI 2.x that we’d be hard pressed to get time to upgrade later on. By building on YUI 3 from the start, we eliminated the need for developing an upgrade path later on.