ArticleSnatch Blog

You are browsing the search results.

Is your company the victim of bad press, or a concerted campaign to push your site down in the SERPs? In today’s enterprise search marketing column, “Maintaining Your Company’s Image in the SERPs,” Aaron Shear explains that building alternative media types, and linking to compelling content about your company on other sites, can often clear up the majority of the unwanted press by moving it down through the rankings.

» Full story

When I read that AOL.com launched a new homepage, I naturally hopped on over there to see what the new look, um, looked like. It looked the same, except with dark blue trim and web 2.0 stripes in the background for good measure.

Otherwise, it still holds the same basic design as….Yahoo. I then came across a story by Reuters which says Yahoo and AOL are conducting “due diligence” on a possible (probable?) merger by the two web companies. I was not at all surprised.

Something else to know about the new AOL is that it incorporates a new social element.
What the new feature allows you to do is sign into social networks like Facebook and Bebo directly from the homepage.This is a smart move and will blend nicely with Yahoo’s push toward open source should the merger occur.

“As the Web becomes more fragmented, consumers want choice and relevance in their Web experiences. AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place,” said Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President, AOL Programming. “Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com. We have already seen success by opening up AOL.com to other e-mail providers. We will continue to enhance the appeal of our portal with the changes we are making today by adding more relevant programming, customization opportunities, greater integration of third party content, improved design and access to social networks directly from AOL.com.”

As soon as Yahoo and MSN started accepting gambling ads, it was only a short time for Google to join them - as their announcement this week has shown. Obviously Google did not want their competitors grabbing the lucrative advertising revenue.

Like Yahoo UK, Google requires a license to be able to advertise - but they do allow companies licensed in their respective European countries to advertise which Yahoo has yet to introduce. MSN at this stage does not require licensing.

The push to allow online gambling in the US is moving forward with former NY senator Alfonse D’Mato part of the lobby for poker sites.

Yahoo is beginning an aggressive advertising campaign in order to get people to use it (again) for search.

Expect to see display ads (like the one below) and hear radio ads as the campaign unfolds.

The Yahoo Search blog posted a radio ad on its blog. It uses the concept of searching the web as a jungle and that users need Yahoo’s security measures to protect them from the dangerous and even wacky stuff on the web.

What do you think of the new advertising push by Yahoo? Leave your first impressions in the comments.

Related Reading:
Yahoo Sets Q3 2008 Earnings Call for Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Yahoo Updates Contextual Advertising Solution
Yahoo Stock Plummets to $13, Investor Proposes Microsoft Acquisition at $22
Yahoo Rebrands IndexTools as Web Analytics; Launches Limited Release

I don’t know if everyone is in a bad mood over the economy or what, but web content is having the worst week ever.

First, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the internet was a cesspool. Then, Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm said that certain social sites are ruining the whole social networking industry because their nicheiness has gone just a little too far in his not-so-humble opinion. Finally, David Cowan decided that the “internet sucks” meme was a good idea for a marketing campaign to push MashLogic, including the tagline “Take back the web.”

You may not want to join a social network dedicated to the admiration of David Hasselhoff, but that doesn’t mean social media is doomed.

You may enjoy half the videos on YouTube, but perhaps they weren’t all created for you.

In a modern day world of customization and the web making things more immediate, we’ve come to expect what we want when we want it.

But now that’s leading to self-important decisions about what should be on the internet in the first place.

The problem with declaring the web as full of junk is that such elitist thinking generally leads to a social form of censorship.

The world wide interwebs thrive off of openness and access for as many people as possible. But if we begin to reign it in because some CEOs, bloggers, and startups decide that what they think is good is the only thing that matters, then the web will truly become a garbage dump of narrow, upper crust excogitation.

Tomorrow, Google co-founder Larry Page will keynote the “Broadband for the Future Event” in Washington, DC. The event is designed to advocate for white spaces, something Google has been adamant about for a long time.

If you’re unaware, white spaces are a unused airwaves between TV stations. Google wants them to be used for free nationwide wireless. Opponents say that it will interfere with the television signals.

Here’s the details on the event if you wish to attend.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
11:30 am - 1:00 pm ET
Room SD-G50, Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Related Reading:
Google to Internet, FCC, Verizon and Viacom: Keep it Open
Google Joins the “Internet for Everyone” Initiative
Google Opens Up About Spectrum Auction

Web analytics provider Omniture today launched Omniture SiteSearch, a hosted site search product it picked up in its Visual Sciences acquisition, which closed in January 2008.

The SiteSearch product was an early entry in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space. It was originally launched in 1999 as Atomz Search, part of its content management suite. Atomz was later acquired by analytics provider WebSideStory, which later acquired Visual Sciences. The entire company changed its name to Visual Sciences, and was then acquired by Omniture.

A few clients, including Verizon and BusinessWeek have been using SiteSearch as a standalone product, according to Jeff Minich, senior product marketing manager at Omniture. Today, it becomes an integrated part of the Omniture online marketing suite.

The biggest effect of this is the ability to impact site search results using data from Omniture’s SiteCatalyst analytics package. So on an e-commerce site, for example, a search for “shirts” could be made to return the most popular shirts of the season, or those that return the highest margin, or those that are converting highest, Minich said.

“You can set business rules to break ties, or to push a page higher in the results,” he said. “You can also combine metrics, and weight them relative to each other, and relative to the natural relevancy ranking in SiteSearch.”

While the rest of the world was distracted by the launch of Chrome, Sugarrae aka Rae Hoffman - definitely a woman who “pulls rank” - was covering the nofollowing of links over at Twitter at the behest of Google.

Her argument is powerful and once again challenges Google for pushing sites to do what they want. As she asks:

“If Google is the one who wants that web link nofollowed because some twitter profile pages may be automated bots or spammers, then it is time they realize that THEY are responsible for determining which of those individual pages is authoritative, trusted and legitimate enough to pass link popularity, by a method other than demanding that other websites and social networks change the ways they do business to help Google stop links being used as a form of currency and to manipulate their algorithm - an issue Google and Google alone created and profited from.”

This should be read by everyone in our industry. Leave the shiny new browser alone for a few minutes and see where our futures are going. Thanks for not being distracted by Chrome.

You won’t find PLR, or private right label articles, at custom article writing services. The reason PLR articles aren’t being pushed anymore is because they are useless. There was a time on the Intern…
More: continued here
plr articles are useless why

While not yet complete, AOL has confirmed that they will acquire SocialThing. The FriendFeed competitor is still in private beta.

No word on the price for the acquisition, but expect it to be small. Still, AOL seems to be going after the social media world, having recently acquired social network Bebo for $850 million.

Bebo has 40 million users, doubling AOL’s media reach via the acquisition.

The push towards social media is likely part of a larger re-focus of AOL’s business model around advertising. AOL parent company Time Warner recently confirmed that AOL will be split into two businesses: internet access and media/advertising.

via The Social