The much anticipated launch of the Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop PPC tool has finally happened, as announced on the official Y! SM Blog. Similar to its counterparts, the Google AdWords Editor and the MSN AdCenter, this PPC management platform promises to deliver a complete set of marketing tools, designed to enhance your control over any SEM campaign.
Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop Loading Screen
A notable difference from more traditional Search Marketing applications is that the Yahoo! SM Desktop tool runs on Adobe Air, as opposed to Google’s AdWords Editor, which is a Mozilla XUL-powered application. Most of you may be familiar with the Adobe Air medium as being the backbone for most Twitter clients, but whether or not this platform will be an advantage in battling the Search giant Google remains to be seen.
I have downloaded the application only recently and there is still much testing to be done before I can offer a full-fledged review of the software, but stay tuned. Alternatively, if you want to beat me to it, feel free to download the tool for yourself at Yahoo! Search Marketing HQ and jot down your own thoughts.
Yahoo! promises us this tool will provide the standard features of a PPC management system:
Bulk editing that will allow easy management of multiple sets of keywords, ad groups, ads and match types;
Export options which will allow us to customize and save a campaign report in Excel;
A keyword tool to facilitate keyword research, long tail targeting and key phrase implementation;
Third-party campaign import options… this one I can’t wait to test. Yahoo! is notorious for holding you hostage for your campaign data and forcing you to export your Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns manually and strenuously (one ad group at a time, one keyword set at a time and so forth…), so one is left to wonder if this third-party import option will also have an export equivalent;
Account performance metrics allowing you to assess your campaign’s performance – obviously, a no-brainer.
So far, I must say I am not impressed with the feature list. I would have expected Yahoo! to step up the game with at least one key improvement to the familiar AdWords Editor interface. For instance, I have often wondered when Google was going to allow us to change a campaign’s bidding model (CPC vs CPM) within the AdWords Editor interface, without having to log into the web interface. Another problem with the AdWords Editor is that the ad writing specifications aren’t synchronized with the web interface… for instance, if I were to write an ad with a headline ending in an exclamation mark (”!“) or with the copy containing ASCII characters, the Editor would allow me to publish my changes to my AdWords campaign, which would, in term, get disallowed via the web interface. The point is you can discover some screw-ups within Google’s PPC tool and I’m quite surprised to see Yahoo! not jumping the chance to stick it to The Man with this new and improved Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop application.
I have yet to see this tool in some real action, but it has already made a negative impression on me, as it failed to download one of my UK campaigns, stating that:
Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop is currently not supported in your market. Please check our website for information on future releases.
The application is not supported in the United Kingdom? I figured it must be due to my Romanian server connection, so I tried accessing it via a proxy… to the same effect. So until further research, I’m giving this tool a disappointed thumbs down.
In an effort to test their own Search Engine – friendliness, Google has released an SEO Report Card, concluding an internal research conducted on the homepages of 100 Google Products. The information provided is basic at best, but it does serve as a checklist to what Google officially considers to be SEO best practices. Thi is an interesting development of Google’s love – hate relationship with SEO and it certainly reassures us, in theory at least, that Google not only supports Search Engine Optimization, but also encourages its practice amongst its own services. One also has to wonder if this internal research has something to do with Google’s recent troubles in China… Perhaps Google is researching ways to tap into the SERPs of other Search Engines. Whatever the case may be, I personally think Search Engines can benefit immensely from the study of Search Engine Optimization and it’s hard for me to believe that Google has just now figured it out, so this SEO Report Card is most likely either a PR stunt or a sort of encouragement towards the market.
In what appears to be an effort of geopolitical muscle flexing, Google has announced on its blog its intention to cease its activities in China, or, to put it in their own words, to review Google’s business operations in China. Google claims to have evidence of several attempts of the Chinese Government to hack Gmail accounts of human rights activists, as well as several other violations of privacy and censorship actions, all leading up to Google’s decision to reconsider their involvement in the Chinese market.
While Internet censorship in China has been well documented since 2006 (see this image for a comparison of Google.com vs Google.cn results for “tianaman”) and I have nothing against Google playing the moral crusader it’s not, I do, however, have a few definitive issue with the context of this decision…
1. The Hero Of The Story Was Actually An Accomplice. That’s right, the Chinese Government enforces hardcore censorship, strictly controls access to information and keeps a tab on the country’s Internet users. But here’s the catch: not only was Google aware of this policy, but they agreed to it and molded their business model to suit China’s regulations, when they first established their offices in China. And Google doesn’t even make a secret of it, acknowledging it bluntly in the official statement: We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. So Google actually agreed to abide by the unique moral standards of the Chinese Government and now they admit it, like it were a minor concession. Which brings us to point two of my discourse…
2. The Dr. Mengele Arguement Let’s take a closer look at that line from the official statement, shall we?
The belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. All right, fair enough… Google’s executive decision to go ahead with the launch of Google.cn, despite Government censorship stands to reason, being for the benefit of the general concept of access to information, right? Wrong! Consider, if you will, the implications and the undertone of that quote. Stripping the text down to its essence and interpreting it stripped of Google’s charming arguement of information liberalization, we’re basically given to understand that Google contributes to the Government’s efforts to limit people’s access to information. No, I’m sorry, I do not believe that, despite “some minor censorship efforts”, the people were still the beneficiaries. Google’s statement is underplaying the role of censorship, to cover its own arse. The underlying tone is ridiculous in itself; there is no such thing as liberal censorship. Trying to downplay Google’s contribution to Chinese censorship, implying the “greater good” is like trying to excuse Dr. Mengele of torturing Jews, by invoking his contribution to the field of Medicine.
3. Why Google’s Company Philosophy Is Just Corporate BS
Like we would expect from Google, it aggrandizes itself as the Messiah of the Internet. And on the seventh day, Google layed forth ten laws it holds sacred. And this Decalogue can be read on the Google Corporate Information Page. Needless to say, these arguements are not at all watertight. In fact, Google violates most of them on a routine basis. But, for the sake of arguement, let’s see how Google’s Chinese exploits measure up to some of its own guiding principles…
Now the first line of these commandments is a quote by the prophet Saint Larry Page, stating the perfect Search Engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. All right, so basically, if I were, let’s say, Chinese and I were to google, I don’t know, tianamansquare (or 天安門廣場 in Traditional Chinese), in the interest of information, the SERPS would return content dealing with the 1989 protest and massacre, right? Well, not exactly, but it would give me bright propaganda images with the great Tianaman monument, communist flags and proud citizens. Again, if I were to google Chinese communism (or 中國共產主義 in Traditional Chinese), I would get images of human rights protesters, popular uproar and people shot in the streets, similar to the Google.com results, right? Well, actually no, I would get 10 pages worth of propaganda posters, artistic depictions of socialist folk heroes and so forth on Google.cn. All right, yeah, Google definitely understands me and delivers exactly what I want. I suddenly feel the urge to get a below-minimum-wage job at a sweatshop. Thanks, Google!
Commandment 1:Focus on the user and all else will follow. So, basically, if you’re a simple Chinese citizen, with the Government keeping an eye on your everyday life, you are being served Government-controlled information. In this respect, Google lives up to its promise, for sure. Commandment 4: Democracy on the web works. Right, umm… moving on… Commandment 6: You can make money without being evil. All right, err… moving on… guys, you’re making it hard on yourselves… Commandment 7: There’s always more information out there. Right, you’re just not entitled to it, because you live in a communist country, so, there you go. Sucks to be you.
4. The Great Asian Conspiracy Everybody likes a good conspiracy theory from time to time. Hell, even you do, admit it! The problem is, this time I don’t have enough facts or the necessary patience to actually devise a clever world domination plot for the Google Chinese Crisis, so I am only going to list some weird coincidences and leave it up to my readers to make some sense of it all in the comments section…
First of all, the Google Chinese Crisis comes one day after Baidu.cn was attacked by hackers. So? Big deal! Well, Baidu.cn is Google’s main competitor. So much in fact, that it hogs around 75% of the Chinese Search market, being one of the last real competitors for Big Brother Google in the world today. Now I’m not trying to imply Google actually commissioned the attack on Baidu, I’m just guessing that nobody at Googleplex actually wept for Baidu the day of the transgression. Furthermore, ChinaDaily notes the attack was not carried out against the Baidu server, but the US – based domain name register. Naturally, any fingers pointing at Google would be preposterous, as the sophisticated attack has already been claimed by some punks from a random organization, namely the “Iranian Cyber Army“… ah-hah! Now I get it… uhhh…
All right, the attack on Baidu and Google’s sudden decision to renegotiate its terms with the Chinese Government coincided. Granted. Besides, some minor-league email hacking attempt is a totally believable excuse to cease all operations in the top Internet country of the world, right? But Twitter has been buzzing lately with similar, albeit minor coincidences… first, someone noted the website Baidu.tw redirecting to Google Taiwan and Twitter has been flooded with comments on this issue. Granted, Google’s implication is highly unlikely, as a simple Whois query will point to the owner of the website, whose email address is registered to some obscure Chinese platform, http://21cn.com. Subsequently, Yahoo! Japan president, Masahiro Inoue said Google is nothing special, commenting on several services offered by the Big G.
I will admit, the above information does in no way justify a conspiracy theory and suspecting Google’s implication would be sheer speculation. And the goal of this article isn’t to blame Google for world hunger and WWII (although I might consider that for a future post). I am merely pointing out that “things are happening”. The Search market isn’t just some tiny business in the back pocket of a geek toy, called the Internet. It has grown to huge proportions, so much that today we are talking about the geopolitical implications of a Search Engine’s actions, as economic leaders anxiously await the results of a Search Engine’s negotiations with the Chinese Government. Just let this thought sink in for a moment, then meditate, if you will, on how far the Search business has evolved over the last decade. To sum it all up, the times, they are a-changin’.
When it comes to web metrics tracking, nothing beats manually following when Search Engines spiders crawl your website through your access logs. But in order to keep tabs on Search Engine crawlers, you need to know who they are… in short, you need to know their IP’s. Following is an IP list for Google’s and Yahoo’s bots and a link to a list of other spiders. Happy bot hunting!
I recently heard from a bird (actually, it was a beard, an Andy Beard, to be precise) that Google has introduced a penalty for blog comment spamming. As it usually happens, Google won’t admit to being a late bloomer in any issue regarding web usability. Accordingly, the tone of the original post (published by Adel Saoud and Paolo Petrolini on the Google Webmaster Central Blog) implied that Google already applied ranking sanctions for comment spamming and that this message is just an informative update. Truth of the matter is, Google is probably just starting to take actions against abusive links posted in the comments section of blogs.
What does it all mean?
Long story, short, your blog relevancy is affected by the links posted in your post comments and if you do not manage to tidy up that particular section, you will suffer TrustRank penalties and ultimately drop in the rankings. I have to agree with Google on this, it makes sense, up to a point. But first, let’s look at the official arguements, quoted straight from the horse’s mouth (or, in this case, the GWC):
“Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people’s hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords”
True enough. A blog’s comments section is a space designed for on-topic interaction and dispute. A comment box stuffed with irrelevant links not only ruins the user experience, it also downgrades the actual article to which it comments.
“Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them”
This might just be a bluff on Google’s part, in an effort to ward off any potential spammers, by reaffirming its position as the web’s ultimate relevancy arbiter. In truth, Google probably has little control over the quality of links posted within the comment section of a blog and the comment spam detection system is probably just in its infancy state.
“Having original and useful content and making your site search engine friendly is the best strategy for better ranking”
Here we may have actually stumbled upon the real stake of this message. Introducing a blog comment filter in the ranking algorithm might just be another one of Google’s efforts to limit the SEO bad boys’ arsenal.
What can we do about it?
Most blogs feature intelligent spam filtering solutions (speaking strictly from WordPress experience), but there still isn’t a 100% guaranteed method of absterge comment spammers from your blog permanently. In the post’s conclusion, Saoud and Petrolini were kind enough to offer some suggestions to zealous webmasters who want to limit spammers’ access to their system and, consequently protect their precious rankings:
“Disallow anonymous posting”
Fair enough. Providing minimum information (e.g. a nickname and an email address) shouldn’t be too much of a hassle for your potential commentators. However, this method has revealed its vulnerabilities, with the advent of Black Hat automation software.
“Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming”
Being an adversary of the dreaded CAPTCHA, I can not applaud this suggestion, especially since it is just as vulnerable to the above mentioned threat. So why stress your visitors with a cacographic abomination, when you can just as effectively ask him/her to provide minimum identification?
“Turn on comment moderation”
There are still people who disable comment moderation?
“Use the “NoFollow” attribute for links in the comment field”
I usually encourage adding the “NoFollow” attribute to uncontrollable outgoing links, but this can prove to be a problem, especially if you want to monetize your blog (hint: affiliate marketing). You can sacrifice a lot of link love this way and it is very unlikely that hardcore spam freaks will be discouraged by the “NoFollow” attribute, assuming they know what that even is.
“Disallow hyperlinks in comments”
No. No. No.
“Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags”
Again, risky territory, especially for those webmasters who try to cash in on their ranking positions for certain keywords (hint: affiliate marketing, once again)
My own two cents
Although the obvious benefits of waging war against comment spamming can not be denied, this new take does raise some questions. Like where does Google draw the line between a spammer and a harmless marketer, trying to add valuable input to a post and to promote his own website in the process? Or where are the battle lines drawn? Will quality matter or will the deciding factor be quantity and chance, in the end? And last, but by no means least, there is something to be discussed about the practical application of the comment spam filtering. Needless to say, Google’s warning targets only webmasters who host comment spams on their blogs and not the spammers themselves. This makes sense, since it would be damn near impossible to chastise a website for link spam on one blog, if it runs a completely legit link building strategy the rest of the time. In addition, Andy Beard makes an interesting assertion at the end of his report of the GWC announcement, asking what if a competitor was trying to sabotage your ranking by spamming your blog’s comments section?
Whether the comment spam penalty will add value to the user’s online experience or not, will be determined by time and the adaptability of the community. It all starts out as a good idea; but, then again, so did communism…
Although Google internally updates the PageRank score on a daily basis, they only export the data to the Google Toolbar periodically. Now I am far from being a supporter of the Google PR and, more importantly, of the fuss it’s causing amongst marketers. However, Google’s see-saw declarations on the matter force me to take the PageRank score into consideration and to keep a check on PR updates. Wouldn’t want to disappoint High Priest Matt Cutts now, would we? What follows is a list of the more recent Google PR updates, estimated through personal observations, community feedback and conjecture:
Google PR is to marketers what the Mayan stone calendar is to archaeologists
30 October 2009
23 June 2009
18 May 2009
1 April 2009
3 December 2008
27 September 2008
26 July 2008
26 February 2008
11 January 2008
27 October 2007
29 April 2007
14 January 2007
Yahoo! officially announced the closing of their web hosting service, GeoCities, on October, the 26th, 2009.
It is like attending a funeral service for a nasty, despicable relative… everyone – yourself included – hated the bastard, but you can’t help but feel a draft of nostalgia and sadness. There are few non-technically inclined Internet users who have not had at least one page set up within one of the service’s many “neighbourhoods” back in the day. During those “Wild-Wild-West” days of the World Wide Web, GeoCities was the platform that gave us the chance to be web publishers before web publishing was cool; in a time when owning a website was seen as somewhat elitist, GeoCities provided anyone with a functional, albeit ghastly and horrendous personal or professional website.
Of course, in today’s Web 2.0 world, GeoCities has become something of an inside joke and few people would ever think about actually establishing a web presence through the system, so Yahoo! – who had acquired the platform back in 1999, four years after its inception – had little choice but to shut the service down for good, a move that had been announced in early April. The closure leaves current GeoCities site owners with an upgrade option, allowing them to move their free GeoCities website to the Yahoo! Web Hosting platform. Care to speculate on the number of users who will actually take Yahoo! up on this offer? My guess would be somewhere around 50, two of which will most likely be David Bohnett and John Rezner, founders of the original BHI company, in 1995.
Although GeoCities is widely speculated to have been an unprofitable business venture for Yahoo!, it has empowered and inspired people’s self-expression online, an attitude that has shaped the way we use the Internet and that has spanned many relevant aspects of today’s World Wide Web, including blogs and social networks.
So as we bid a final farewell to an old friend and look towards the future, we must never forget that we may well owe WordPress, Facebook and Twitter to the much-ridiculed GeoCities.
Earlier this week, rumours started circulating the WWW, announcing the soon-to-be-released Google Music, a platform supposedly offering advanced music search capabilities, along with an in-browser streaming functionality.
The match between Internet giants Google and Yahoo / Microsoft is heating up, with the playoffs probably scheduled for the second half of 2010, which will see the launch of Google Chrome OS, a heavyweight contender for Micrososft Windows’ undisputed veteran OS championship reign. In the meantime, however, neither of these major league contenders is touring the country and signing autographs. They are all hard at work adding value to the Web 2.0 environment and to their shares of stock. But Google might take the Spartan approach, as it seems to be looking to taunt junior heavyweight star, Apple.
A couple of days ago, Wired.com divulged Google was working on a new project, intended as a music search platform and speculated on the possible names for said platform, namely Google Music, Google Audio and Google One Box. The service is likely to be unveiled next Wednesday and will feature song previews and buying options via music retailers Lala and iLike, according to the same source. Now aside from the excitement and fun, this might turn out to be a big move on Google’s part, as such a music platform is likely to target a market traditionally dominated by Apple’s iTunes application. Although the new system will most probably feature some similar functions to those of Yahoo Music – more specifically, song and artist search, news and artist information – the song preview streaming and buying options, however, are clearly a poke at the iTunes media player application.
The Google Music project seems to have been one year in the making, according to FoxNews, having been suggested to Google by the Big Four of the music industri themselves, SA Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros. Music Corp and EMI Group. In other words, a staggering 85% of the music industry is looking to break the iTunes monopoly on music download.
With the more or less official announcement of Google Music, the company took a rahter bold, albeit profitable step forward, teaming up with the entertainment industry’s giants to tackle a well-established monopoly. Not only will the new platform boost Google’s image and score points in the epic Search Engine Wars, but it will also fill the shareholders’ pockets, as the collected revenue from advertising will most probably be immense. With record sales plummeting to record lows and Internet music downloads rising fast, Google has seized a tremendous opportunity and has proven, once again, that it is always one step ahead of the competition in terms of understanding and capitalizing on the potential of Web 2.0.
I need not emphasize the importance of tracking the Search Engine spiders crawling record of your websites, need I? Whether you want to check the zeal and regularity of Search Engines in visiting your website, want to find out which specific pages were crawled, want to verify the obedience of crawlers towards your robots.txt file or you simply want to filter spider activity from your web metrics reports, you need to keep track of the various spiders and bots sent away to do the Search Engine’s dirty work. Provided here is a list of the IP addresses of the majority of Search Engine crawlers, for which I can’t take credit, which solely belongs to Dan Kramer of IPLists, whose efforts have made the world of Web 2.0 a better place. If you would like to do more than thank Dan for his efforts, you could buy him a drink.
In a previous article discussing Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture, I pointed out some evident applications of a prospective Web Metrics platform dedicated to monitoring and analyzing the overall online performance of Adobe-specific software.
Although the business models of the two companies seem rather antithetical, they can also be regarded as complementary. Omniture sells technically sophisticated software-as-a-service to data analysts, while Adobe brings creativity to the table. Now, as Jason Burby of ClickZ recently predicted, outside of improved integration for designers building the sites, there are a few positives and a couple of negatives that could arise from the Adobe-Omniture pairing. But I would like to dismiss the obvious and embrace the utopia of a soon-to-be-released data tracking solution for Flash content, PDF files and vector images.
Within Adobe’s by-the-book PR feed (including a Press Release, the two companies’ financial data and official statements) there was a diagramdetailing the ideal merger of the two dissimilar business models:
The Adobe-Omniture Business Model
Being an incurable dreamer, I took the liberty of deducing from this simple schematic that the dawn of a new age is upon us: the age of the SWF Analytics systems. Deepening this thought, I came up with a list of at least 5 features a potential RIA performance measurement platform should include to really make a difference in the Internet Marketing business:
1. PDF Drilldown. This setting would not only allow Marketers to track the number of downloads of a particular PDF file, but also provide details about the post-download usage of said file. More specifically, you would gain insight about who accessed your PDF, what their browser of choice was, where they came from geographically, as well as how far they got to reading the text, if they clicked on any links or acknowledged certain calls to action within the document, if they revisited the site after reading the PDF and so forth. This feature may not seem too appealing to traditional SEOs, but I am a Document Optimization afficionado, so for me the aforementioned information would prove invaluable.
2. Flash Game Event Tracking. This function of the RIA Analytics system would be another treat for Web 2.0 freaks. This report would enable you to track the behaviour of players accessing your Flash games. As with the PDF files, you would be able to learn what areas of the game are more popular, which call to action works and which doesn’t, whether or not your players click advertising links within your games, the players’ demographic profiles, what the bounce rate is for your games and last, but certainly not least, if your Advergaming campaign has achieved the desired results.
3. Video Segment Analysis. I know Tracy Chan, Product Manager at YouTube, keeps promoting their reporting tool as being the equivalent of Google Analytics for video content, but I feel that YouTube Insight still has a lot of shortcomings and that it is far from being an advanced video performance monitoring instrument. In this respect, I think the market is still very much open for the arrival of a real competitive metrics measurement system for Flash videos. With the Video Segment Analysis feature of the Adobe-Omniture RIA Analytics program, one would learn about the most viewed segments of a video, the frequency of buffering skip, the number of clicks obrained (if clickable captions were used), behaviour patterns of users who leave comments to videos etc.
I know Adobe and Omniture have just settled into their marital home and that they have a long way to go before gracing us with any revolutionary Marketing product – if they ever will. Still, it is every Marketer’s right to dream, is it naught? Preserve the Union (of Adobe and Omniture, that is)!
![[Ask]](http://seo-wolf.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/ask.png)
![[del.icio.us]](http://seo-wolf.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
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![[LinkedIn]](http://seo-wolf.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/linkedin.png)
![[Mister Wong]](http://seo-wolf.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/misterwong.png)
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![[Yahoo!]](http://seo-wolf.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://seo-wolf.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
So as we bid a final farewell to an old friend and look towards the future, we must never forget that we may well owe WordPress, Facebook and Twitter to the much-ridiculed GeoCities.
for the second half of 2010, which will see the launch of Google Chrome OS, a heavyweight contender for Micrososft Windows’ undisputed veteran OS championship reign. In the meantime, however, neither of these major league contenders is touring the country and signing autographs. They are all hard at work adding value to the Web 2.0 environment and to their shares of stock. But Google might take the Spartan approach, as it seems to be looking to taunt junior heavyweight star, Apple.
A couple of days ago, 
