search marketing blog: ambergreen

In a landmark ruling the California Supreme Court has ruled that bloggers and internet providers cannot be held liable for posting defamatory remarks written by third parties.

Brought as a result of case in which a San Diego woman was sued for posting defamatory remarks about two doctors, companies such as Google, Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon supported the battle that may save them from future libel cases and protect online freedom of speech.

The ruling stated that people who claimed to have been defamed online could now only seek damages from the author, not the website which posted the comments. The court said that ISPs were protected by Federal law stating that providers of chat rooms or news groups are not considered the publishers of information contributed by others.

This ruling opens a potentially worrying situation, where anyone could quite deliberately redistribute defamatory statements without repercussions.  However, online freedom of speech has been preserved and ISPs are happy as they have long proclaimed to fall into the same bracket as telephone companies, merely “common carriers” who could not be subject to libel laws.

Google, MSN and Yahoo! have teamed up to support Sitemaps, a free open source software tool which allows webmasters to make their site more accessible to search engines.

Sitemaps will allow a catalogue of pages to be created in the form of an XML file listing URLs along with additional metadata, and will also inform spiders of content updates and newly added pages.

This is an interesting development and an unusual one to report on! It’s not every day that you can say that Google, Yahoo! and MSN all back the same development, but better indexing can only be good for the web and it’s good to see the search giants put their weight behind such a project – it can’t be too long until everyone else joins in.

Have a look at the interview from PubCon where the announcement was made.

Both Google and Yahoo!’s share of the search market continues to grow, with the former driving 78% of referrals in the four weeks to 21st October 2006, up 9% on 2005’s figures for the same period according to new stats published by Hitwise.

As Yahoo! retains second place with 7.7% of the market, Hitwise revealed that the share of referrals from search engines to e-commerce sites has grown.

VP of Research Heather Hopkins said: “Google and Yahoo! Search in particular are seeing strong growth in their share of the UK search market and their share of referrals to online retailers. Growth for these search engines seems to be organic, driven in part by toolbar usage but also growing familiarity with the Google and Yahoo! brands.”

Mobile operator 3 yesterday took steps towards revolutionising the slowly developing mobile internet market by generating revenues from customers subscribing to use advanced mobile services.

Subscribers will be offered free long distance phone calls and unlimited internet access from mobile devices for a monthly flat fee. X-series will be available to 3 customers from December and is likely to cost in the region of £10 to £15, although this is to be confirmed.

3 has signed a deals with Google, Skype and eBay among others to provide a range of services to subscribers, who will be able to access MSN instant messaging, eBay auctions, Windows Live Messenger and call any of the 136 million Skype subscribers around the world for free.

With 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, the war to win the mobile internet market seems as if it’s about to hot up.

According to 3’s finance director, Frank Sixt, mobile services have been too highly priced with too narrow a range of applications to make uptake attractive.

“Forcing people into a walled garden of services in a mobile broadband world is wrong. And it’s not acceptable to make choice so expensive that it’s no choice at all,” said Sixt.

Meg Whitman, eBay’s chief executive, called the deal a “key milestone” in the development of the mobile internet.

In addition to the mobile services offered, X-Series users will also be able to buy an additional gadget from Sling Media which will allow them to watch pictures from their home TV on their mobile device will anywhere in the world.

Keyword analysis can be a bit dull, but as we know it’s also one of the most important parts of the SEO process. You really need to be on the ball when doing a keyword analysis, otherwise it’s easy to pass over keyword variations which might otherwise be really useful to a client’s campaign, so when a range of tools designed to make the process as easy as possible came along, I had to take a look.

All of the tools below find keywords that are related and come up with variations that might be difficult to pick out with your own wee SEO addled brain.

Quintura – offers a visual representation of words related to your main query

Ontology Finder - This easy to use tool checks Google’s top 1000 results for your query by doing a related keyword query, before returning the related keywords found.

AdCenter Search Funnel - Microsoft’s tool shows you how users refine their searches, making it really easy to source related keywords that you probably wouldn’t have thought of.

Clusty Cloud - This tool makes a tag cloud with related keywords. Some of its related results are a bit random, but it gives some good results.

Adwords Site-Related Keywords - I’m sure that you all know about the keyword suggestion tool from Google, which suggests related keywords based on a URL or keywords you provide.

If you have any other brain saving tools let us all know!

Zippy is a new search engine designed to help webmasters and SEOs by querying Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask and returning the results mashed together, before ranking the returned pages among them.

Built by hardened SEO Dave Naylor, Zippy is easy to use although it would be useful to have a ‘Help’ section as I can imagine that the myriad of results appearing might prove confusing to those used to the easy interface of Google et al.

A basic search for ‘ambergreen’ returned a heap of results. First of all Zippy offers a range of related searches from each engine, before taking all of the returned results and indicating which engines they were found on, before ranking them down the page. Those results which feature in multiple engines feature higher than others.

It’s easy to find out more about domain too; by clicking the orange arrow next to the term, Zippy reveals a range of information – domain age, IP address, PageRank, pages indexed etc – and offers a really quick and easy way to find out what you might otherwise spend hours doing.

The Domain Information search is probably the best bit of Zippy; you can find out loads about a site using this tool including the top ranking keywords, server information, total keyword phrases, textual content of the page and more. You can even set domains in opposition against one another using the Domain Comparison to find out where competitive advantage might be gained,

Zippy offers a really easy way to do some serious market research without spending hours wading through lists of SEO tools to find out what you need to. As it was created by a seasoned SEO it caters to those people who can really make use of its in depth statistics.

Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think about Zippy – do you think that it has the potential to be as helpful as I do?

Google’s new Adwords landing page quality score algorithm has been causing a bit of a fuss over the past few day. Grant has taken a look to find out what’s going on with the world’s largest advertiser.

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Earlier this week, we reported that Google will be launching a new landing page quality score algorithm for AdWords ranking and pricing. It has now been released and Google AdWords advertisers are speaking up. It appears, like in the past, this update is forcing many advertisers to bid higher for their keywords, in order to realize top placement and clicks on their ads. There are a ton of good write ups already on this topic, so let me show you just some of the ones I found.

(1) Steve Bryant of eWeek was the first to post on this, he named his post Google: Screwing Advertisers Over Before Christmas? and goes through a story of one particular advertiser’s thoughts on this.

(2) Then came graywolf’s post on Threadwatch named Adwords Quality Update II = Price Gouging Round II where he shows some very revealing statistics to back this title. There are over 20 comments at his post, with feedback on his post.

(3) It is always great to hear from Andrew Goodman on these changes. Over at his Traffick blog, he wrote Lack of Editorial Transparency a Nagging Concern with AdWords in a Quality Score World where he explains;

Somehow, in spite of the advantages to Google (and potentially Yahoo) of hiding the details of algorithms, more transparency needs to be injected into the editorial side of what leads to an extremely low quality score.

(4) I wrote at the Search Engine Roundtable a post named Google AdWords Advertisers Up In Arms Again Over New Algorithm where I pull out reports from advertisers at WebmasterWorld forums on the new algorithm change. I pulled out six reports of price gouging and one report of a happy advertiser.

My thoughts? Never do such a big update to the landscape right before a big holiday season! Give people a way to prepare for this change. Yahoo is doing this right now with the Panama update. I trust that advertisers will learn to adapt to this new algorithm, eventually and I hope that Google helps them along. I just think this is all bad timing, right now.

Online shoppers are likely to leave an e-commerce site if it takes longer than four seconds to upload says a new survey from content delivery experts Akamai.

Akamai found that 75% of the 1,058 people surveyed would not return to sites that took longer than four seconds to load, one of shoppers’ pet hates along with high prices and postage costs.

With two thirds of shoppers likely to abandon shopping carts where sites are hard to load, difficult to navigate or have a long checkout process, online retailers have a responsibility to ensure that shoppers are faced with an enjoyable, efficient experience every time they shop.

Compared to research conducted several years ago during the early days of online shopping, the new four-second threshold shows that users patience is worsening, with the current four second limit half the time, suggesting that shoppers are becoming increasingly impatient.

To compound matters, Akamai found that online shopping experiences colour consumer’s entire view of the company behind it, with 30% saying they formed a “negative perception” of a company with a badly website or would tell their family and friends about their experiences.

In the midst of one of the highest spending online Christmas’ ever, surveys such as this only serve to highlight that in many cases online retailers still have someway to go.

Trying to capture traffic from the long tail of a site’s search traffic just got easier with a tool from HitTail, a new company which is helping tailor content to drive visits.

Essentially a log file mining tool, HitTail offers an easy to use tool that makes suggestions as to the words to use in blog post titles and content based on the terms that are already driving traffic to a site.

HitTail is a currently a free service from New York PR firm Connors Communication and it is hoped that premium features and service for high volume sites will be offered after an initial beta period.

This seems like an easy way to look at the long tail of search traffic, but it could be very helpful in providing the information needed to capture that long tail traffic which can often prove to be elusive.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/09/hittail-the-long-tail-as-muse/

If you want to make sure that you keep up with up the cool kids and know what’s going on across the web, the most popular news and the searches driving traffic, Popurls is a single page which presents a selection of the most popular links from the most popular community sites, news search engines and blogs.

An easily browsable page, Popurls makes it really quick and easy to find out what people are talking about all over the world and takes in headlines, pictures and videos.

With a broad selection of stories from some of biggest sites including Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, Google News, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo News and Slashdot, Popurls also allows you to search the Snap search engine and includes shortcuts to search del.icio.us, Technorati, IceRocket, MySpace and Wikipedia.