Search Engine News

Vocus, the company that owns PRWeb sponsored a study by the Society for New Communications Research. They talked to over 420 marketing and PR professionals about the different ways they view press releases. It reminds me of the evolution from getting search results and rankings in Google, to a focus on web site traffic and conversion. From what I’ve seen PR professionals are gradually changing perspective. It’s a tough transition because their clients seem to value seeing their name in print over the incremental benefits of traffic and sales.

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I am a big fan of social bookmarking. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t add to my huge collection on Delicious. But recently my online research is not just for blogging but for academic papers. So I have taken a look at three great free tools for social bookmarking that will let me register a wide range of bibliographic information. These tools also facilitate online research collaboration and networking.

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Many B2B marketers have difficulty justifying the value of search engine optimization (SEO) to senior level executives. Since SEO is a highly-efficient marketing channel with longer-lasting results than most mediums, establishing ROI is challenging yet critical. Here are a few suggestions on how to best integrate web analytics data with other tools to prove the value of SEO.

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Does your site maintain its usability across many browsers? If not, you could end up leaving money on the table this holiday season. Browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (which comes standard on Macs) now make up about 30% of the browser market. Firefox alone enjoys 20% of the overall market share. Matt Poepsel, vice president of Gomez, Inc., whose services test and monitor the performance of websites says that the increase of non-Internet Explorer browsers could cause some e-tailers grief.

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I’m most of the way through Seth Godin’s great new book, Tribes.

It’s a book about leadership, and the need for leadership at every level to achieve meaningful change in any setting. It’s also about distinguishing between a passionate group that can “go places” and achieve something together, as opposed to a loose aggregation of people who don’t really care enough to matter.

More from www.traffick.com…

In covering search marketing for the past 13 years, I’ve tried not to be judgmental about certain marketing tactics some people might undertake. Search engines have “rules” that they themselves knowingly allow others to break. Arguments erupt over the idea that any type of marketing is “manipulation.” But at some point, enough is enough with some tactics. And today, I’m done. I’m calling bullshit on anyone who is link spamming or creating crappy nonsensical content sites.

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Having only sold the odd website (and not bought any) this session was of some interest. The increased time and cost in manual link building for new websites has made buying existing websites an obvious choice for some and we were to find out the best ways to buy.

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Microsoft and Yahoo took a tumble in their year-over-year search share in October 2008, according to Nielsen Online. All searches were down 2%, which is quite surprising considering the election and the economy. Yahoo was down 12% and Microsoft was down 19%. Ask.com took a hit as well with a decrease of 22.9% The news was much brighter for Google and AOL. Both saw sizeable increases at 8.1% and 14.5% respectively. Google continues to dominate the search engine industry at a 61.2% market share. Here’s the full chart:

The Borg just keeps on growing…

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The Live Search team has just rolled out some useful new features for the Webmaster Center. If you’re using this Microsoft service aside from Google Webmaster Central you might appreciate these new features. If not, you might as well read on and who knows you might start using the Webmaster Center from now on.

First of these new features and the most important in fact is the Webmaster Center’s malware detection procedure. It now more efficiently detects whether your webpages and the webpages your site links to are infected with malwares. Once the Webmaster Center malware detection tool found any existence of malwares in those links, it will immediately flagged the links and notify you in your next search results that those links contain malwares. In addition, you can now download detailed reports of malware attacks on your websites and even includes ways to fix it. Once you’ve fixed your site, you can immediately ping the Live Search team to have your sites re-scanned and re-included in Live Search results as quickly as possible.

New features for Microsoft, old-hat for the rest of us…

More from www.searchenginejournal.com…

Google acknowledged breaking the official rules of Apple’s iPhone software development kit when it created the latest version of the Google Mobile application for the iPhone, but denied a more serious charge. A Google spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Google Mobile uses undocumented APIs (application programming interfaces) in order to use the iPhone’s proximity sensor to prompt a verbal search. iPhone developers were only supposed to use the APIs that Apple published in its SDK when they create their applications under the terms of that agreement.

This will be big in the Blogosphere, but really, who cares in real life…?

More from news.cnet.com…