search marketing blog: ambergreen

Microsoft hosted an adCenter Labs event last week which saw a few hundred advertisers treated to a viewing of the latest updates and innovations to the adCenter advertising platform. Microsoft was keen to demonstrate it’s latest adLabs projects prior to the adCenter release expected in the next few months, which is set to include a pilot release of Microsoft Content Ads, the new contextually-targeted ad program that shows text ads on Microsoft-owned sites.

Future projects currently being researched by adLabs were demonstrated, with keyword optimization, video display ads, and consumer orientation emerging as the key focus for development.

Kevin Newcombe was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of Microsoft’s developments which he reviews over at SearchEngineWatch

Yahoo! began rolling out some changes on Friday, so some ranking shuffling should be expected.

Digital Inspiration has posted on Googlebot ignoring the robots META tag or robots.txt instructions, the two methods used to prevent Google crawling webpages. Taking two case studies – one from del.icio.us and another from Google Finance, it seems that Googlebot has even cached pages form one of it’s own sites which were disallowed.

The responses generated by the posting are interesting, have you noticed this happening?

Matt Cutts has announced that Google’s quarterly PageRank export is underway, where scores shown in the Google Toolbar and elsewhere are being updated.  According to Matt this won’t make a difference to your site’s ranking or traffic to visibly change as these PR scores are already in use in Google’s scoring. 

ambergreen are always telling people not to focus too much on PageRank, something which Danny Sullivan comments on in his review of Matt’s post.  This is summed up by the discovery that while Google sends plenty of traffic to Search engine Land, the site has a PR of zero.

Matt also discuss supplemental results, and while ha has already admitted that pages in the supplemental index are those deemed to be less important from a PageRank perspective than ‘normal’ results, he does say that supplemental results will continue to become fresher results, enabling more traffic to be gained from supplemental pages.

Also on the agenda are the ‘filetype:’ operator (which allows you to see the results of certain filetypes - i.e. filetype:doc – for a certain keyword)

Be sure to check out Danny Sullivan’s analysis of Matt’s post, as it looks into other recent areas of concern such as CSS indexing and duplicate content. 

SearchEngineLand discusses a recent patent application from Yahoo! which gives some allusions as to the work Yahoo! is doing to user created information into the way in which they index, organise and rank information.

Yahoo!’s increasing moves into social search with the acquisition of MyBlogLog, Flickr etc indicate just how much Yahoo! is willing to stake in this area, and this patent seems to highlight further moves to enable the company to “exploit shared community interactions to improve other Web activities, in particular, search,” as Raghu Ramakrishnan, Vice President and Research Fellow of Yahoo!, has previously said.

This article discusses several papers which indicate how Yahoo! intends to accomplish greater management of the interactions between Yahoo and users of Yahoo services.

A funky new system unveiled by Microsoft and Ford will allow voice-activated phone calls and music choices to be made by car drivers.

Unveiled at the Detroit auto show, the Sync digital dashboard control system is a platform to manage mobile phone and music use, allowing any Bluetooth phone to connect to the system and offering integration for iPods, Zune players, USB memory sticks and handheld devices.  Sync will also allow internet audio streams to be played.

Developed by Microsoft, Sync is designed to integrate into any vehicle, although ford have been the only manufacturer to sign up so far.  The system will be available in 12 models from this year.

Imagine picking up your mobile phone, typing in a number and speaking your search term before addresses, links to web sites, and phone numbers for the closest matches in your area appear on your screen.

A new patent from Microsoft describes just that, a voice search technology which would allow users to search by voice before receiving results via text, IM or in a web browser on a handheld device.

Find out more information on the patent at SEO by the Sea.

A recent SEO Refugee thread discussing whether Googlebot was checking CSS files has been followed up with an update from ekstreme.com which seems to suggest that Google is indeed requesting CSS files.

Checking log files, Pierre Far of ekstreme.com found some evidence that the requesting IP addresses did belong to the Google IP block, with comments seeming to back this up.  Could this be Google’s new attempt to read external CSS and javascript files to stamp out black hat techniques? 

For many years the Google link command (using the link:www.domain.com syntax to determine the number of inbound links a site has) has been unreliable at best, downright misleading at worst.  Link popularity is so important when it comes search engine ranking, but Google has never really offered the accuracy of information needed. 

Over at SEOMoz Randfish has posted that Google’s link command works perfectly in Google’s blog search engine, if not the main site.  Randfish offers some interesting data comparisons here which make it difficult to understand why Google doesn’t offer such solid data across the board.

There’s a new visual search engine in town that I’ll be tempted to use for the cuteness of its logo alone. PageBull collects results from several engines, presenting images of each result in a list of results.

PageBull’s results are shown as pictures of the search result pages, doing away with text entirely. Depending on your browser window size you can select different size images, and while its sometimes hard to read the on page text, it gives a goods impression of what the page is all about.

With images generated on the fly and the search term highlighted on the page, Pagebull is really impressive. And so cute - mooo!