The rapid growth of search engine marketing over the past two years has firmly established the SEO and SEM sector as an important concern for the mainstream advertising industry. Lacking the long-term background and technical resources to properly serve the intense demand for search marketing from clients, the traditional ad agencies are starting to think about the search marketing industry. Read more…

Change seems to be the theme of our story these days with the Internet, search marketplace and our daily set of tasks morphing rapidly. Change is a good thing but never comes without its price. For us that price has been painful, literally.

The StepForth staff has just survived what has to be counted as the longest, most physically challenging weekend in the nine year history of our firm. Bill is still down sick, Scott is temporarily offline, Ross, Mark and I have just recently gotten back online, and our new offices are still turned upside down. Read more…

Google’s new China focused portal, Google.cn has been roundly and rightly criticized for censoring results shown in China at the request of the repressive Chinese regime. The absence of material deemed dangerous by the Chinese authorities leaves search results that tell the “right-side” of the story. This is the material open to viewing Chinese citizens. Read more…

StepForth is leaving its quiet, residential space in the Fernwood neighbourhood of Victoria and moving downtown to its new Bastion Square offices.

The move is prompted in part by the tremendous growth of our industry over the past few years. We’ve grown too, bringing on new staff, upgraded services and a growing list of marketing partners. Also, the new location is simply too nifty to pass up.

This will be our last full day in our current space. On Friday, we start the process of ripping out the servers, dismantling the office, disconnecting our computers and saying goodbye to the funkiest section of town.

We’ll miss the Thin-Edge of the Wedge pizza parlor, the George and Dragon Pub, and our downstairs neighbour, “Fast Sammy” the convenience store owner. Our free-range mascot, Hydro the death-defying squirrel will also be remaining behind.

Our new offices are located in historic Bastion Square overlooking Victoria ’s gorgeous inner-harbour. Our new building houses some of the oldest offices in the Pacific Northwest region, originally built as a warehouse for supplies heading towards the Yukon gold-rush or to logging and mining interests on the north end of Vancouver Island.

Needless to say, we are all excited and a bit intimidated by the move.

As of Monday, our new address is:

StepForth Placement Inc.
#208, 26 Bastion Square
Victoria BC,
V8W 1H9

Please note that our phone numbers and email addresses will not change.

Toll Free (North America) : 1-877-385-5526
Local Phone Number: 250-385-1190

On behalf of the StepForth crew, I’d like to say thanks to the entire Fernwood neighbourhood. You’ve put up with a lot of parties, traffic, and general geeky weirdness from our space and we’re going miss it here. Thanks for the support, friendship and being such amazing neighbours.

As expected, the roll out of change in the world of search is proving to be highly disruptive. Though the year is only three weeks old, noticeable shifts are occurring among the largest search entities and throughout the search marketing sector, making the scenery much different this month than it was just a few short weeks ago. These are among the most interesting times on the Internet as the largest players are positioning themselves to take their unique and collaborative runs through the year of global convergence. Read more…

Yahoo, the longest running search related business still running on the web has admitted defeat in the organic search sector, noting that Google remains the most popular in terms of market share. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, Susan Decker said, “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” Read more…

Many search commentators have connected the rapid drop in Google’s share-values with their recent tussle with the US Department of Justice over its refusal to share search-records with the Government. As far as I can tell, the only thing connecting the two is the coincidence of timing.

As anyone with even a remote interest in search knows, the legal drama unfolding between Google and the DOJ fell out from the closet and into the public realm early last week, nearly a year after the DOJ initial request was complied with by Google’s rivals, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Of the four major search engines in the United States, Google was the only one to resist the US Governments demand for information on searches conducted by its users.

Within days of the story breaking, Google share prices began to fall, showing a sustained decline for the first time since the search firm went public in August 2004. The sudden drop sent search journalists scurrying to their keyboards to make the unsubstantiated connection between the court case and the value of Google stocks.

What these commentators are neglecting to mention is that investors are becoming wary of the search sector, seeing the bulk of revenues coming from the single source of paid search advertising. Although Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing continue to shower shareholders with positive results, Yahoo’s most recent financial numbers, filed last week, just before the Google share drop started, came in one-cent below investor expectations.

The dust-up between Google and the US Department of Justice is very important and something all search engine users should pay very close attention to; however, it is not likely the root cause of the drop in investor confidence in the search sector. Perceived instability in the long-term business model is far more likely the reason investment management firms and the investors who rely on their advice appear bearish about Google this week.

Yesterday, the Bush Administration asked a federal judge to order Google to give the US Government access to approximately one week of recorded searches. Read more…

Mirror, Mirror, on the Web, Who has got the biggest head?

According to the egoSurf Top50 , I do, for the time being at least. I even appear to have a bigger syndicated ego than the truly great grandfather of search journalism, Danny Sullivan, though a slightly smaller one than someone named LawMoose.

egoSurf is a new vanity search/reputation management tool that allows you to check your placements on Google, Yahoo, del.icio.us, or Technorati in relation to the number of links back to your blog(s) or URL(s).

If a name is mentioned in, or associated with a piece of writing or a blog document, “ego points” are assigned to that name. The more verifiable references found, the more ego points scored. Apparently, my name is mentioned a number of times in a number of places, likely found by reading between the by-lines. My new found and totally befuddling big-headedness is entirely due to the nature of an environment that allows 2000 word musings to be instantly syndicated through live-feed RSS or human-edited copy/paste routines.

Writers will vanity surf much in the same way an actor will preen in all mirrors. Reputation management is part of the job. It is amazingly gratifying to confirm I do in fact, have a big ego, even if that knowledge is known to go straight to my head. (I’m gonna be mega fun to work with for the next few months eh?)

If someone were to ask you to name the core business of General Motors, chances are you would naturally respond, “automobile manufacturing”. If that were your answer, you would be invited to join the 99% who also answered incorrectly. The correct answer is automobile purchase financing through General Motors Approved Credit, (GMAC). In reality, GM makes most of its money from interest payments it earns helping consumers purchase the vehicles it builds. Read more…