Google vs China

When the communist government of the third largest economy in the world and the largest Internet search engine go head to head in a game of virtual chicken, both sides swerved, for good reason. Each had plenty to lose in the potential collision.

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Google vs China

Google’s Brand Debacle Backfires

As Google reached the limits of returns in direct marketing they started pushing the value of branding (because, hey, if you can chalk it up to latent branding value there is no cap on your max bid). Surprisingly, they even got many big brands to buy their own brands AND buy sitelinks on the AdWords ads. Some went so far as providing case studies for how much of their own brand traffic they were now willing to pay for, which they previously got free. Sure that can make sense for seasonal promotions, but you could do the same thing by having subdomains and sister websites. Dell.com can be the main site, Dell.net (or deals.dell.com) can be the deals & promotions website, and Dell.org can be the good karma charity site. No paying someone else for brand you already spent to build. Beautiful. But I digress… In October of 2008 Google’s CEO revealed which ad Dollars they were chasing , and what loophole they were opening up in their relevancy algorithms “Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” That led to the brand update , and now Google even recommends specific brand modifiers when you search for words like “digital cameras.” …and here is the problem… Less than 2 years after Mr. Schmidt’s prophetic brand drivel, the Financial Times is doing a series on Google, in which Google’s Amit Singhal is blaming brands as being a major issue : Companies with a high page rank are in a strong position to move into new markets. By “pointing” to this new information from their existing sites they can pass on some of their existing search engine aura, guaranteeing them more prominence. … Google’s Mr Singhal calls this the problem of “brand recognition” : where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to “venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at”. Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect , he adds. No mention (of course) that it was Google which put excessive emphasis on domain authority, or how Google gutted the link graph , or how Google funds most of the content mills with AdSense . Those are all irrelevant details, just beyond Google’s omniscient view. The other thing which is absurd, is that if you listen to Google’s SEO tips, they will tell you to dominate a small niche then expand. Quoting Matt Cutts : “In general, I’ve found that starting with a small niche and building your way up is great practice.” And now brand extension is somehow a big deal worth another layer of arbitrary manual inspection and intervention? Meanwhile scraper sites are still clogging up Google , and they claim they need to write better algorithms to detect them. It isn’t hard to see the sun at noon! If sites which expand in scope deserve more scrutiny then why is there so much scrape & mash flotsam in the search results? What makes remixed chunks of content better than the original source? A premium AdSense feed? Brand?

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Google’s Brand Debacle Backfires

6 Ways to Learn SEO

Posted by randfish One of the most common questions we receive here at SEOmoz is “What’s the best way to learn SEO?” There are

With Interest At A Frenzy, Bing Attaches Itself To LeBron’s Hip

Sure, D-Wade and Chris Bosh may be teaming up to play together in Miami. But LeBron James has a new partner of his own: Bing . Tomorrow night, millions of people around this country (and likely the world) are going to be tuning into ESPN to watch the NBA star announce his decision about where he’ll be playing basketball for the next several years. ESPN has created a special program for the event which they’re calling “The Decision” and they’re promoting the hell out of it. Microsoft Bing will be sponsoring that show and more importantly, likely donating millions to the Boys and Girls club charity — a stipulation James’ camp wanted for the event. And that’s not all Bing is doing with LeBron. As you can clearly see on lebronjames.com right now, Bing is prominently displayed as the search engine on the site. That couldn’t have come cheap for Microsoft as millions of fans are hitting the site daily trying to get the latest word about where James will go. Bing is obviously touting both deals today. “ We are excited to be a part of LeBron’s important day and to be the official decision engine of the site LebronJames.com and one of the presenting sponsors of ‘The Decision’ program, ” Lisa Gurry, Bing’s Director, writes on the Bing community blog today. She goes on to note Microsoft’s long-standing relationship with James — yadda, yadda. The bottom line is that this is a smart move by Microsoft to get some key prime time exposure for their search engine among a key demographic. CrunchBase Information Bing Information provided by CrunchBase

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With Interest At A Frenzy, Bing Attaches Itself To LeBron’s Hip

Using Google’s Webmaster Tools Search Queries Report To Identify Low Hanging Fruit

Posted by Tom_C Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow spot those SEO opportunities on your site which were low effort and high value? Well this post gives you a few ways you can do that! Sweet. I’m going to be digging around in the recently released search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools: Step 1 – Gathering The Fruit The first thing we need to do is gather all the fruit (aka keyphrases). So within GWT select search queries and select just “web” queries and in this case I’ve selected “United States” since that’s the main target market for SEOmoz. The more we can narrow this down the better data we get, if we leave image search etc in there and leave countries like Serbia in there the less accurate our data will be: Once we have filtered the data we then want to download the data to Excel: Step 2 – Identify The Low Hanging Fruit Once we have the data in Excel we can do some monkeying around to get some meaningful insights. When you download the data you will be presented with a lot of dummy data like this:

Free Data

The other day a person contacted me about wanting to help me with ad retargeting on one of my sites, but in order to do so they would have had to have tracked my site. That would have given them tons of great information about how they could retarget all my site’s visitors around the web. And they wanted me to give that up for free in an offer which was made to sound compelling, but lacked substance. And so they never got a response. Given that we live in “the information age” it is surprising how little people value data & how little they expect you to value it. But there are still a lot of naive folks online! Google has a patent for finding under-served markets . And they own the leading search engine + the leading online ad network. At any point in time they can change who they are voting for, and why they are voting that way. They acquired YouTube and then universal search was all the rage. Yes they have been pretty good at taking the longterm view, but that is *exactly* why so many businesses are afraid of them . Google throws off so much cash and collects so much data that they can go into just about any information market and practice price dumping to kill external innovation & lock up the market. Once they own the market they have the data. From there a near infinite number of business models & opportunities appear. Google recently became the #1 shopping search engine . How did they respond? More promotion of their shopping search feature. All those star ratings near the ads go to a thin affiliate / Google value add shopping search engine experience. Featured placement for those who are willing to share more data in exchange for promotion, and then over time Google will start collecting data directly and drive the (non-Google) duplication out of the marketplace. You can tell where Google aims to position Google in the long run by what they consider to be spam. Early remote quality rater guidelines have highlighted how spammy the travel vertical is with hotel sites. Since then Google has added hotel prices to their search results, added hotels to some of their maps, and they just acquired ITA software – the company which powers many airline search sites. Amongst this sort of backdrop there was an article in the NYT about small book shops partnering up with Google. The title of the article reads like it is straight out of a press release: Small Stores See Google as Ally in E-Book Market . And it includes the following quote Mr. Sennett acknowledged that Google would also be a competitor, since it would also sell books from its Web site. But he seemed to believe that Google would favor its smaller partners. “I don’t see Google directly working to undermine or outsell their retail partners,” he said. “I doubt they are going to be editorially recommending books and making choices about what people should read, which is what bookstores do.” He added, “I wonder how naïve that is at this point. We’ll have to see.” If they have all the sales data they don’t need to make recommendations. They let you and your customers do that. All they have to do to provide a better service than you can is aggregate the data. The long view is this: if Google can cheaply duplicate your efforts you are unneeded duplication in the marketplace. Look at the list of business models Google publicly stated they were leery on : ebook sites get rich quick comparison shopping sites travel aggregators 3 out of 4 ain’t bad. But they even on the one they missed, they still have an AdSense category for it.

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Free Data

Chango Closes $1.4 Million Round, Brings Search Targeting To Display Ads

Toronto-based advertising startup Chango closed a $1.4 million Series A funding, with new investors Metamorphic Ventures and privately from Geoff Judge , a VC at iNovia Capital and co-founder of 24/7 Real Media. Last November, the company raised the first $750,000 of the Series A from iNovia Capital and Extreme Venture Partners. Chango is an ad platform that targets display ads based on people’s previous search history. It is what is known as a “search retargeter.” Unlike other ad retargeters like Criteo who show ads to people based on the fact that they have visited a particular Website, Chango targets ads based on the searches those people have done in the past. The way it does this is by buying up browser cookie data from data exchanges, toolbar companies, and vertical comparison shopping sites. This data is commercially available for hundreds of millions of people on the Web. When you click through to a site from a search engine, that site captures the referral data, along with the search terms that brought you there. Sites often resell this data along with identifying cookies. When you show up at a site with Chango ads, it matches the cookie on your browser with what it knows about your search history and tries to serve up relevant display ads. In effect, what Chango does is open up display advertising to search marketers. “We’ve just launched in private beta,” says founder and CEO Chris Sukornyk. “We are still selecting which advertisers we are working with, and will probably launch a self-serve option later this month.” Sukornyk is a serial entrepreneur with a mixed track record. Previously he co-founded the X-Stream Network (a free ISP in Europe sold to LibertySurf for $75 million), Bubbleshare (photo-sharing site sold to Kaboose for a couple million dollars, and then deadpooled ), and FiveLimes (a green shopping site sold to Avid Life Media , which now appears to be defunct). CrunchBase Information Chango Metamorphic Ventures Information provided by CrunchBase

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Chango Closes $1.4 Million Round, Brings Search Targeting To Display Ads

6 Ways PRO Can Add Value in 15 Minutes

Posted by randfish As many of you who read this blog know, I’m a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that

China Swings, Google Flinches

Back in January, with big balls, Google wrote the following: We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. In March, Google backed that talk up by redirecting google.cn to google.com.hk , writing the following: Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China. The Chinese

Clash of the Titans: The Battle To Become The Mobile Search Leader

Editor’s note : The following guest post is by Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of mobile ad exchange Mobclix . Mobile search is still one of the big unclaimed prizes on the mobile web. Everyone from Google and Yahoo to Apple is going after it, but Microsoft’s Bing may stealthily become the king of the castle by aggressively promoting Bing through mobile apps. Let’s look at each player’s mobile search strategy. Apple: In The Driver’s Seat During the Apple keynote in April, Steve Jobs announced the new iPhone 4.0, iAd and a few other features even he didn’t seem too excited about. Out of the many mediocre features, Mr. Jobs happened to squeeze in a declaration that, “ On mobile, search hasn’t happened. People aren’t searching on their phones.” During the keynote at WWDC this month, Mr. Jobs declared that iPhone 4 users would have the opportunity to select their search engine from among Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Out of the three, Bing got a special endorsement from Mr. Jobs. Is Mr. Jobs trying to blindside the other players in this space by making them think he is not concerned about search? I’m sure all of the search traffic he is sending to Google is driving him nuts. Meanwhile, Google has happily—and quite beautifully—optimized their search results page on the iPhone to make it extremely convenient for local searches by incorporating phone numbers, maps and more within the Safari window. Remember the days you would dial 411 or, even more recently, send an SMS to GOOG for information about local businesses or venues while you are on-the-go? Does anyone do that anymore? I’m sure people love paying $1.75 to find out the name of the local pizza shop. By the time you dial 411 and struggle through the automated voice menu, you could have pulled up addresses, phone numbers and reviews to the five nearest pizza places and be one click away from an interactive map. Apple brought the traffic to mobile search, but why not make money off it? Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all see the value of controlling search across mobile devices—not just the iPhone. Similar to the web, these three goliaths want to be the starting point for every consumer query. All three have launched iPhone specific apps with slightly different flavors as they try to first win the hearts of the iPhone user. Yahoo! Doesn’t Know What It Wants To Be Yahoo! is all over the place in the App Store. It has two iPhone apps in the iTunes App Store. Within the reference category, the Yahoo! Search app is ranked at #30 with 658 comments. For the most part it includes many of the same core features that the other search apps offer. To get more mindshare from users, Yahoo! has sprinkled many other apps in various categories with the Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Entertainment apps and a pretty successful Yahoo! News app (#47 with close to 50,000 comments). This attempt to build interest just dilutes Yahoo!’s audience across multiple apps—which, if combined together, could have a significant impact. It’s Google’s Game To Lose As the default search engine plugged into mobile Safari on the iPhone, Google has always had an advantage driving mindshare to its mobile apps. It was the first one to use voice activated search and has steadily built out its host of features since making it easier to access core Google products like Gmail. The Google Mobile app is currently ranked first in the reference category for iPhone apps with more than 2,000 comments. Hello, Bing! Far behind when the gates opened, the Bing team is pushing out new features as fast as possible, trying to draw from Google what works best. Interestingly enough, the results (even on a local level) are quite different from the very accurate Google search results. The Bing search app received a nice endorsement from Mr. Jobs at the WWDC keynote, so lofty expectations are already set. It is currently ranked No. 2 in Reference. Microsoft released an updated Bing app last week with a few new notable features: Visual Scanning (very similar to the Red Laser iPhone app eBay acquired earlier this month) and tapping into social graphs through Facebook and Twitter status updates. The entertainment angle is allowing Bing to create a unique niche that ties back to search. It also redesigned its mobile browser search to make it more of an app-like experience. Advertising as a Distribution Channel The biggest hurdle is getting these app installed on as many devices as possible, but thanks to all the apps in the App Store there is an abundance of ad inventory available for marketers. App developers, if you don’t already love these big boys, you should. They have been spending significant amounts of money (think six figures-plus) desperately trying to get in front of as many of your users as possible, which translates into more money in your pocket. All of the search giants use in-app marketing to push their own apps. Yahoo! and Google have done a great job avoiding creative saturation by building out a wide array of messages, colors, languages and landing pages, as well as making use of geo-targeting. Boom! Bing Changes the Game As the Bing team continues to spend more money on advertising, they recently changed the game, significantly crushing Google in the app rankings. How? Easy… Attaching yourself to successful apps with consumer brand power is a sure fire way to rise to the top.“We absolutely market our applications on the iPhone, I don’t think of it as unique to anything else. It is like promoting on the toolbar,” Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Bing recently told TechCrunch co-editor Erick Schonfeld. “Yes, it has been effective.” For example, Bing took the Top 100s by Year app that allows users to stream songs by decade for $1.99, rebranded it to Top 100s by Year by Bing , made it free and inserted advertising to drive users to download the Bing Search App. The Top 100s by Bing app instantly surged to the top of the App Store and remained in the top five for weeks. It remains at the top of the music category hovering near favorites like Pandora and Shazam. And, as I mentioned, the Bing search app is currently No. 2 in Reference, and in the top 100 free iPhone apps overall. Ads within the Top 100s app that drive users to download the Bing app: Fresh off the success of leveraging sponsored apps to drive downloads to the Bing app, Microsoft has recently reached out to a new audience segment by sponsoring the ESPN World Cup Trivia app , which is ranked No. 6 in the sports category. Rather than taking the viral nature of the Top 100’s music app, Bing and ESPN are also running display inventory to drive additional traffic to the World Cup Trivia app. So where does this leave the Bing search app? How about in the top 100 of all free apps and, more importantly, at one point it even squeezed Google’s app out of the top 50 free apps. Bing has taken a simple concept, executed and proved the value of the model by consistently keeping their brand top of mind across top apps in different categories. Mobile search is here, whether you want to believe it or not. Take Apple’s recent acquisition of Siri for a small sum of around $200 million to $250 million. It will be pretty easy to use that as the nucleus for an Apple-owned local search product for mobile. Not to mention the valuation is around the same price tag as what it paid for Quattro Wireless. As the market grows, Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Apple will become more cut throat. Don’t expect to see Bing ads on Google Mobile Ads or Apple featuring Yahoo!. Likewise, we may not see as many new Google and Bing apps in the App Store in the near future. But they will keep pushing forward as much as they can. After all, they probably don’t have much time before Mr. Jobs begins to think differently about mobile search. CrunchBase Information Bing Google iPhone 4 Mobclix Information provided by CrunchBase

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Clash of the Titans: The Battle To Become The Mobile Search Leader