Why is it that when one search engine does something, every other search engine jumps on the bandwagon? From the introduction of similar new products and features to the coincidental timing of product introductions, the major search engines frequently tend to trip over each other’s feet. This tendency is getting mention in the mainstream media with an article from tech-writer Seth Hansell in today’s New York Times noting “Search Sites Play a Game of Constant Catch-Up“. Read more…

The concept of local Internet advertising is rapidly gaining acceptance with users and advertisers with a predicted 46% increase in ad-spending in 2005 according to a study conducted by Borrell Associates in 210 U.S. media markets.

The Borrell study includes advertising in online newspapers but notes that local-search spending accounted for nearly 8.4% of the market. 2004 was the first year Borrell included search in its local online ad-spending studies. Read more…

Adding fuel to the rumors that Google is going to introduce a proprietary browser, Google Inc. has hired the lead developer of the Firefox web browser, Ben Goodger away from the Mozilla Foundation. Despite a volume of circumstantial evidence such as the registration of the domain Gbrowser.com or its organization of open source programming events, Google has repeatedly denied speculation they are developing a web browser or an operating system. According to Google spokesperson Steven Langdon, Goodger will be working on products that enhance the browser experience such as the Google Toolbar and desktop search.

Goodger will also continue working on upgrades to the wildly popular browser he has fostered over the past 18-months. Google will be donating half his time back to the Mozilla Foundation. In a Monday morning post to the Mozillazine Blog, Goodger wrote about his new employment and continued role at Firefox stating,

“As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above – with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general.”

Firefox is quickly becoming the browser of choice for Internet professionals who appreciate the expandability of open source software. Over the past six months, millions of web users have migrated to the Firefox browser, suddenly taking a large market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Mozilla and Google have a lot in common with each other. Both rose to mass popularity because of word-of-mouth testimonials from very satisfied users. The only comparable mass-migration in Internet history was the meteoric rise of Google itself over the past four years. Both identify Microsoft as their main competitor and both have drawn an enormous amount of attention from Microsoft.

Mozilla and Google also have similar cultures of young, smart engineers who feel they are different from the common business mold. Both groups are committed to the creation of “disruptive technologies”, or technologies that make products which change the ways people use the Internet. Lastly, both Google and Mozilla employees believe their work will make the web a better place. While it is only safe to say a partnership between the two is a likely development, the alliance between the two firms is obvious.

Much has changed since last year in the world of search engine marketing. These changes have widened the knowledge gaps between the SEM sector, our clients and the general public. A knowledge gap separating professional experience and general interest is natural in any industry as a quick peak under any newer model car hood will demonstrate.

In a field as user-dependent and re-evolutionary as the search industry, knowledge gaps can lead to expensive chaos for consumers, advertisers and webmasters. Many common assumptions about search engine marketing have been made obsolete or require a different way of thinking. Many erroneous assumptions continue to be proliferated in hundreds of forum posts, emails and marketing articles. Read more…

This is a breaking story about Google AdWords based on several rumours, readings and conversations. There is a fair likelihood that some information here is erroneous. In an email, Google Advertising PR Michael Mayzel stated, “We are not providing comment.” If correct the implications are huge and might provide Google advertisers critical protections they’ve been asking for.

Google is about to announce significant changes in the way it does business with its advertisers. Read more…

Over the past year, Blogs have been used to manipulate search engine rankings in a very big way. Couple the immense power of link-distribution inherent in the Blogosphere with Google’s way of ranking websites based on the number and relevancy of incoming links and add a number of SEOs with overactive imaginations. The result is a spamming machine of mythic proportions.

Remember the SEO competitions of last year when the nonsense phrase: “Nigritude Ultramarine”? Well, if you don’t, suffice it to say it was a contest to see who could get and keep #1 placement under a phrase that was at the time, totally fresh as it wasn’t a real phrase to begin with. The results proved the power of Blogs and link-densities. Now Google, Yahoo, MSN and others have joined together to support a new link-attribute that stops spiders from following specified links

The new attribute is called “nofollow” and is designed to be placed within an anchor tag.

For instance, the link: [a href=http://www.isedb.com/]Search Industry News[/a] will allow a spider to follow the link to the ISEDB homepage.

A similar link, [a href="http://www.isedb.com/" rel="nofollow"]Search Industry News[/a] will NOT allow the spider to follow. The attribute can also be placed in front of the URL in the href string.

Google says it will not count links with the nofollow attribute in PageRank scores and will not count the anchor text in terms of relevancy to the page linked to. This should effectively remove the benefits of link-spamming in forums and blogs. Even so, the overactive imaginations found under dark-hats in the sector are already working on work-arounds. It will be interesting to see how this new tag works out.

MSN has removed the beta-wrap from its proprietary search engine and is now showing self-generated results at MSN.Com. Beta results had started bleeding into MSN listings over the past three weeks but since Sunday (Jan 16), the .COM (US / Global) version of MSN has consistently mirrored those found at MSN(beta). Regional versions of MSN continue to display Inktomi (Yahoo owned) / Regional partner generated results (Jan19, 05).

At this time two years ago, Google was the only major search database, feeding search results to Yahoo and eventually by extension to MSN. Around this time last year, Yahoo began to break away from Google by amalgamating data from its acquisitions of Overture, AlltheWeb, AltaVista and Inktomi into a monster database built on the dbase they bought from FAST. This was a huge project that resulted in a database almost as large as Google’s. When Yahoo stopped using Google generated results, MSN stopped showing them as well. At the same time, a new spider named MSNbot was making its presence known, appearing in our clients’ server-logs with amazing frequency.

The introduction of an MSN search engine makes the business world of search a lot more interesting and might help open the door for other smaller firms such as Lycos and Ask Jeeves to gain a toehold against Google. However MSN changes the business of search, it will help improve on the science of it by innovation rather than invention.

The engineers at MSN have had the luxury of watching everyone else invent dozens of wheels. They have had the time to see what works well and what makes money. They have watched great ideas that should have succeeded fall to failure and not so great ideas flourish until the market determined their death. Having created much of the environment themselves, they also know the histories of the web and appear to have learned when to act and when to lay-low.

The search engine that they have produced takes factors that worked well for others and combined them to make what could become a very popular search tool.

Like Google, MSN’s spider finds new sites by following links directed to those sites. MSNbot is active all the time. So active in fact that about five weeks ago a few webmasters reported so many visits their servers crashed. MSN revisits sites very frequently as well. Over the past year, MSN has compiled a 5-Billion site database.

Once a site is in the database, MSN looks at the number of links directed to that site. There is no hard data on the role topical relevancy plays in how MSN determines links however it is assumed by most that anchor text plays a major role. (Anchor text did factor in our initial tests however with the beta version of the engine)

Next, MSN looks at the content of the site. This is where much of the ranking determination is made. Sites with great text and clear internal link-paths are ranking very well with MSN. Of our entire client base, only one site with excellent text and internal linking lost a top placement at MSN when the new version was introduced. Strong, keyword enriched titles and body text continue to provide strong placements. We are fairly certain that the anchor text of internal links can influence placements as well.

Size matters with MSN as larger sites with long-term content appear to be doing very well under more generic keyword searches. Content rich news and information sites and large corporate sites should be able to leverage their size and content-scope into high placements. The size and content-scope factor should also work well with large e-commerce sites, provided a very clear mapping technique makes the site as easy to access as possible for MSNbot.

There is a simple experiment that folks should run every time a new search engine is introduced or a new algorithm is applied. Open three browser windows (or click on the following links) and cue up MSN.Com, Google.Com, and Yahoo.Com. Enter a keyword phrase important to your business or interests. For this example, I will use one I am familiar with, “Artificial Turf”.

Look for similarities between what you know works at Google and Yahoo and you can learn what works well at MSN. The Field Turf website ranks #1 at each of the Big3 under the phrase “artificial turf”. The index page itself is dynamically generated and does not always present the same text information limiting the effectiveness of seo-copyrighting and keyword densities.

There are several remaining areas on the site SEO work could be applied and a number of off-site factors that collectively contribute to the site’s top placements. Based on this simple test, we can determine the following.

A website that has a large number of incoming links will get noticed and spidered a number of times. Google recognizes 131 unique domains linking to the Field Turf website. Yahoo notes over 1000. MSN sees far more, weighing in above 1500. Next, note the “quality” of incoming links. Google is taking a very refined approach to contextual-quality while Yahoo and MSN seem more interested in the number of links.

Titles make a big difference at all three and are an important area to work on when doing basic SEO for MSN. MSN also seems to be able to read text found in drop-down menus such as the ones on the right hand side of the Field Turf index page.

Another important factor in improving and retaining rankings is updating the site. MSN states on its “How MSN Search Works” page that pages that are active will be spidered more frequently and achieve stronger rankings.

The business of search has changed radically over the past four months, working through a scenario that has been building for about two years. MSN going live with their own search engine is huge news with as many unknown implications as known ones. Its presence will challenge many basic assumptions about SEO and will play a large hand in determining the future of the search industry itself. The greatest general change is the burst of corporate diversity and identity in the search marketplace. A range of new products and services has been introduced by every search tool from the Big3 to the dozen or so smaller but notable search firms. Google is buying ad-space and fiber optics. Yahoo is reporting massive earnings as it pushes into the Chinese market, and MSN is suddenly in the house, so to speak. The precursors of change are written on the wall and MSN is betting much of that change will be found between the walls of your home.

More on MSN very soon.

Cyberspace is almost always bigger than we think but big does have its limits. Logic tells us that the environment known as cyberspace is finite. It can grow but there are always definite numbers or statistics that can be used to measure its boundaries. To be practical, the boundaries of cyberspace are defined by bandwidth-capacity. Google, which lives in a world of infinite possibilities doesn’t accept the concept of finite gracefully. Faced with the obvious limitations of growth to the Internet as we know it, Google is doing the most logical thing possible. It is grabbing more bandwidth-space in order to allow it to expand the current finite boundaries of cyberspace. Read more…

The extremely useful Overture keyword suggestion page has been crashing over the past few days. Used by thousands of SEOs as a way to judge the user-popularity of specific words and phrases, the Overture Keyword Selection tool was an integral part of the SEO toolkit.

It’s official folks, MSN (beta) is powering MSN.Com! At least it is today.

We have been conducting random tests over the past three hours and have not seen old-MSN results. Unless otherwise noted, assume MSN(Beta) is now MSN-Live