Important Search Engine Marketing- related News

From TechCrunch: Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms

Andy Beard: Digg Favorites Slapped by Google

Careful folks: recruiting links is a dangerous game. It requires knowledge of what is & what is not a quality link and you should have a healthy feel for the risks involved when investing your limited time & resources. Approach it with a respect for the fact that Search Engines have an interest in their own business, which is answering search queries accurately. They will always strive to analyze content, including the contents’ link structure, based upon its’ actual value to a consumer.

Breaking down Google's system

Portfolio.com has a good article and an interactive feature breaking down Google’s system.

Have fun with it

YouTube videos geotagged to a location on Google Earth

Google Maps has seen many useful mashups in the last few months including Street View and integration with third parties such as Craigslist. Now it is Google Earth’s turn. Google is allowing for a Google Earth/ YouTube Mashup with video’s geotagged and viewable from within Google Earth’s 3D view.

Geotagged video’s on YouTube viewable by location via Google Earth will combine satellite imagery, terrain and city buildings. When a video is uploaded on YouTube the option of adding an address to the video is available.

This could have a fantastic effect on using YouTube videos to showcase property as a Real Estate video could be geotagged when uploaded to YouTube. The user could watch it whilst looking at that neighborhood online.

The Real Estate Search Engine is one of the top three traffic generators in Real Estate

Trulia has risen to become one of the largest Real Estate listing services outside of the controlled MLS environments. Trulia have today announced that they now are on par with Google and Yahoo! as one of the top three drivers of traffic to real estate companies in the USA.

Hitwise, the online intelligence agency measured data which showed that Trulia was in the top three in contributing traffic to the 12 largest residential Real Estate Franchisors& Brokerages in Mid-August - Mid-September 2007. They were more successful than other competitors including Google’s very own GoogleBase, the national Realtor.com and Craigslist (one of its main competitors) and Zillow.

According to the data Trulia contributed 11% of traffic to the surveyed group. Trulia puts it down to its customer service oriented business model as well as its unique neighborhood information. This has caused Trulia itself to post double digit traffic increases on a monthly basis taking average user numbers up to around 3 million a month.

The service has often been a great resource for Realtors as well as consumers. With 80% of homebuyers searching the internet for property before contacting an agent it is vital that this opportunity be watched.

Of course for Real Estate bloggers this is fantastic news as agents can advertise properties on Trulia and link back to their blog post about the property and drive traffic to their blog as well as using the neighborhood information to help the consumer - this is again another part of your Integrated Search Marketing Strategy, you will be driving relevant search results and information to the consumer, like so;

By advertising a property on Trulia you can link back to your blog post with your own write up about the neighborhood and include more photographs, an embedded YouTube tour as well as your contact information, whilst the consumer can see Trulia’s information on the neighborhood, which may be more statistical in nature and will allow a potential buyer to corroborate Trulia and your information as well as providing as much detail as they like on the property.

Google Doc's is a great free piece of web based software that allows you to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online

Many will have heard of Google Documents and Spreadsheets, which has just been renamed the all encompassing ‘Google Docs’ and now allows users to create Documents, Spreadsheets and presentations online!

This software supports the many popular formats including the formats: DOC, XLS, ODT, ODS, RTF, CSV, PPT.

Thi is great news for those who are on the run and needto modify a document or quickly type up a letter or even access your latest accounts when you left them on the PC at home and you are at the accountants office! Well, Google docs is an answer!

It allows you to create a document and then access it from anywhere! You can also share the document amongst others and make changes in real time! The web based software is perfect for business and personal users and is part of the changing internet which is moving toward information reaching the consumer and file sharing strategies with files being held in remote locations rather than local machines - much like an office Intranet, the Internet has already starting a path to possibly becoming one large user Intranet.

Picture being on the road and able to access your entire range of prepared presentations and handouts in a few clicks! And it gets better, you can save your documents to your local machine in many formats, including: PDF - the universal document format.

Imagine the flexibility!

Whats more is that the software is continually evolving, whereas some office programs have stayed fairly static over the years, the dynamic environment that Google Docs creates is ideal for users.

Today they added the presentation function, recently they adjusted the AutoFill on the spreadsheet facility and for the future..who knows?!

Plus is it is available in 25 languages!

Online Encyclopedia Giant Takes on the biggest search engines in the world

With over 8.2 million articles in over 250 languages and having grown from virtually nowhere in just 6 years, Wikipedia is nothing to be sniffed at. The web based encyclopedia is a great resource for children doing their homework or parents researching technology terminology, a vacation hot spot or even a new car.

Wikipedia is true Web 2.0 because it is user generated, with virtually anyone contributing to the resource; however, it can at times have its downside as on rare occasions unscrupulous characters may write something false, obscene or offensive. In such circumstances, the community usually reacts swiftly making Wikipedia a self-policing resource.

Wikipedia is often compared to the over 200 year old British Institution, the Encyclopedia Britannica which has been a knowledge resource for all for generations; however, the latest set of volumes costs over $1000 and Wikipedia is free.

What about the future of the project?

Wikipedia plans to release a new search engine in December called Wikia Search. The hope being that it will be a successful rival to Google and Yahoo! The plan is for anyone with sufficient programming knowledge to contribute to its development, ultimately enhancing the search experience for the consumer.

In theory ,this could prove most useful and similar to other open-source projects such as Linux, which are continually changing and improving. One might argue [from a business perspective] that Google, being such a large corporation, has lost some of its agility.

Of course the business blogging community should take an active interest in this development. Especially as they can help in the development. The development of Wikia Search will take time and adoption by the consumer is also an unknown. Development will combine human resources for ranking sites as well as computer ranking and it is possible the mix will provide a formidable search experience in the future.

New figures show user search behaviour

Despite Google’s dominance in the search market, visitors stay on their site less time than their rivals, Yahoo! & MSN. The figures for August show that Google has more searchers than Yahoo! Searchers on the rival company spent twice as much time hanging around according to the figures from Nielsen/NetRatings as reported by iMediaConnection.

Microsoft through their subsidiary companies MSN & Window Live takes the top spot on the number of unique visitors. - This shows that the emphasis on search engine optimization should be spread around to the other search engines such as Yahoo! and MSN/Live. So if you are using PPC to target keywords as part of your Internet Marketing Strategy then ensure that consider allocating some time and budget for search engines other than Google.

In terms of blogging, there is nothing you need to do to target the other search engines as they will automatically recognize new content on your blog. However, you should check in MSN & Yahoo and see where your posts rank compared to Google. By searching for the title of your post in each search engine you will see if it is found in their index as well as how high up in the organic listings it is.

Google of course is continually changing and improving its algorithms to improve the users search experience to speed up searches to aid user retention.

Google's system for ranking pages involves more than 200 types of information... and PageRank is just 1.

If you read this page on Google’s site you’d certainly believe that PageRank is still the most influential gauge of how your pages are ranked [excerpt]:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.’

However, if you read this piece reported by the New York Times, you might decide that things have changed [excerpt]:

‘As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds. This was the key invention of Google’s founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality. Mr. Singhal [current master of Google’s ranking algorithm] has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls “signals.” PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.’

You could conclude the genie is out of the bottle and that Google’s engineers are far from allowing an abuse of links to undermine their ability to determine what is and what is not relevant. After all, those links could be paid for, recruited, gathered solely for the purpose of gaming the search engine rankings and/ or they may simply be irrelevant. If you think about Google’s interest in finding, organizing and then providing all searchers with the best set of answers possible… and why [profitable business that depends on loyal search traffic], it shouldn’t surprise anyone they have and will continue to advance their systems. This is certainly not to say you shouldn’t recruit and provide relevant links. You should; however know that it’s not the simple exercise it once was and that you should be very concerned with the quality [as opposed to sheer quantity] of your links.

We believe that if you transfer a consistent stream of [your] subject- specific knowledge [answers] to the web by writing or blogging you can actually help Google [and Yahoo, MSN, etc., etc.] If you help them with good information, including what is timely & new, they may just reward you with competitive positioning in their search results pages [SERPs.].

As for a Real Estate Blogsite™, it’s a leading- edge content management solution, preconfigured to serve the ‘business requirements’ of a Real Estate Professional