In case you missed it, a short while ago we posted a video about how to use ALT attributes for images. I’ll include the video here, but I’ll also use this opportunity to remind everyone that you really should subscribe to the Official Google Webmaster Blog (Atom link for feedreaders). Here’s the video:

In the comments, you’ll note that Philipp Lenssen corrects me about something: “IMG” is a tag, but “ALT” and “TITLE” are attributes of the IMG tag. So referring to an “ALT tag” is a bit sloppy and incorrect.

Luckily, the webmaster central folks were kind enough to clarify the original post. John Mueller also made the original post even more valuable by talking about ALT and TITLE and how those attributes are slightly different. John is one of the newer voices in webmaster/SEO communication (okay, he’s been a voice for quite a while, but only joined Google a few months ago); I’m really glad that he’s joined Google. For example, you might have missed his incredibly useful meta tag reference guide that he posted not long ago. Yet another reason why you should be subscribing to the Official Google Webmaster Blog (Atom link for feedreaders). At this point, the official webmaster blog is doing Google SEO-related posts faster than I can.

Right now Google is really good with keywords, and that's a limitation we think the search engine should be able to overcome with time. People should be able to ask questions, and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level. We see a lot of concept-based questions -- not about what words will appear on the page but more like "what is this about?" A lot of people will turn to things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that. But what we're seeing actually is that with a lot of data, you ultimately see things that seem intelligent even though they're done through brute force.

When you type in "GM" into Google, we know it's "General Motors." If you type in "GM foods" we answer with "genetically modified foods." Because we're processing so much data, we have a lot of context around things like acronyms. Suddenly, the search engine seems smart like it achieved that semantic understanding, but it hasn't really. It has to do with brute force. That said, I think the best algorithm for search is a mix of both brute-force computation and sheer comprehensiveness and also the qualitative human component.

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

Matt Cutts wrote two weeks ago at his blog a post about selling links that pass PageRank.

I wanted to comment at his blog, but 500+ comments made me shy away from it and write a full post here at SearchEngineJournal.com instead. Matt presented a number of (allegedly) paid reviews/posts (there is no absolute proof that the author was paid) to demonstrate how badly paid reviews are and why nofollow should be used on any paid review because of it.

I suggest reading Matts post first get familiarized with his examples to which I will refer below.

Although the presented examples are bad, I would like to say something about them. (more…)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study shows that 47% of adult internet users have Googled their own names, and most consider the results accurate. Here's how to have a say in what Google says about you.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arnold Zafra posted about Google’s KNOL service (derived from the word “knowledge”) already on Friday here at SearchEngineJournal.com.

Yesterday Brook Schaaf from Schaaf Consulting reported at ReveNews.com about an article about the subject at the Times Online that was published also yesterday. (more…)

A few days ago Frank Watson blogged here about a new AdSense feature that lets site publishers exclude AdWords ads they feel may be inappropriate for their sites.

AdSense publishers will be able to view ads that advertisers have directed to their sites via Placement Targeting, and choose to block ads they don't feel are "relevant" to their site visitors.

This will certainly be used by AdSense publishers to (attempt to) maximize AdSense revenues - - publishers will block ads that they deem "low-revenue" in favor of ads that visitors will click on more frequently.

But is it good for advertisers? Well, yes and no...

Click to read the rest of this post...

I wrote in November a long article for my website about the necessary steps for a business to successfully engage in organic search engine optimization. The article provides an overview with additional references to go into more detail for each of the steps.

Here is a shorter and more compressed version of this article that is meant to be a high level guide for orientation. It is aimed to people who are not experienced and knowledgeable when it comes to SEO.

SEO is not magic and there is no magic bullet either. SEO is a long term marketing strategy with high ROI opportunities. Because of its long term commitment necessary, is a well formed strategy key to success, a strategy that is followed and verified and scrutinized along the way. (more…)

As Gmail continues its slow (but sure?) trek towards integrating the keyboard shortcut goodness that is the Gmail Macros script in our very own Better Gmail Firefox extension, they've been throwing in lots of handy new shortcuts along the way. We already highlighted Gmail's best new shortcut, but as it turns out they snuck a couple other shortcuts in under the radar: The undo action (when available) with a keypress of 'z' (Ctrl-z anyone) and access to the More Actions drop-down menu with the '.' key. The undo shortcut is particularly useful, since virtually the only time I needed to leave my keyboard in Gmail was to undo a archiving a message. On the other hand, the More Actions shortcut seems like a crippled version of the 'l' shortcut in Gmail Macros. Remember you can get a look at all of the default shortcuts at any time in Gmail by typing a question mark (?), or head to the keyboard shortcuts page linked below.

Outlook users who want to move to Gmail—or just back up their existing Outlook mail there—can do so using Gmail's IMAP access. Tech blog Digital Inspiration covers how. In a nutshell, set up IMAP access to Gmail in Outlook, and drag and drop your folders onto Google's servers. Simple.

Google ban on AllJobs. Global blog-hysteria. What's the real story?

To get the scoop, I turned to Eli Felblum, CEO of global SEO firm RankAbove, after his preso at Dave Burstein's Web Video Summit. His take: blogger-brewed brouhaha.

Elie said the whole fervor over the AllJobs.co.il delisting is just another overreaction to two of the oldest ...

SEO Myths
#1: off-page optimization can hurt sites
#2: there's such a thing as too much SEO, or over-optimization

AllJobs was temporarily removed but went back up quickly. Today -- indexed in both Google and Google.co.il.

Eli noted even Alljobs' top rankings are back: #2 in Google Israel for “jobs” and #1 for “חיפוש עבודה”, which means “find work” (a popular search in Israel). Keyword “AllJobs” in Israel returns both the site and the Ha’aretz story about it being delisted.

Why it got penalized is another matter. Blogger Uri Breitman claims the site had too many backlinks (154,311 via Yahoo’s Site Explorer). Eli translated Uri's SEO myth: Alljobs was allegedly guilty of “עודף קידום אתרים”, or “too much SEO.”

An "aha!" moment? Hardly. More like haha.

The truth: Google and other major search engines have stated they'll penalize or punish Web sites that don't follow their guidelines. Web sites that pay close attention to SE guidelines (or too much attention) do not generally receive penalties.

So I asked Eli if he'd share his view on link building for large enterprises. Would a site with, say, millions of inbound links raise a red flag? He said, "Do something wrong on your site—like the hidden text on the BMW site—and you get banned. Do too much of something right—like the excessive breadcrumbing on About.com—and you get rewarded, or at least tolerated."

"No search engine can EVER penalize backlinks. If any SEO firm ever got confirmation certain backlinks hurt or delisted a site, it would be open season for malicious placing of those backlinks to their competitors’ and their clients’ competitors’ sites."

Good point. So the most likely cause for the temporary delisting?

Click to read the rest of this post...

When Google meets kink

A moment of narcissism by a blogger who covers kink, multiple sex partners and other topics has uncovered a sophisticated attack that secretly installed malware on end user machines by compromising thousands of websites maintained by a large webhost and ginning search results on Google.…

The New York Times wrote an interesting article about the DoubleClick Google deal which suggests the deal will get approved.

The article discussing a possible conflict of interest with the FTC Chairperson Deborah Platt Majoras stated that even if she removed herself the vote would be 2-2. It takes a majority to stop a sale.

Majoras' husband works for Jones Day who has been retained to represent Google in the matter. Interestingly another member of the panel, William E. Kovacic, is married to a partner at Jones Day, though no mention of a possible conflict there was mentioned.

Google is launching a Wikipedia competitor called Knols (or Knol—the Google Blog post pluralizes, but the screenshot shows only singular) into private beta, which will feature user-generated articles by single authors that are rated by readers. Each article is called a "knol" (which, according to Google, stands for a unit of knowledge). Currently authors can write knols by invitation only, and topics aren't limited to just one author. Instead, Knols readers will rate articles with the idea that the best, most informative articles will rise to the top.

The fact is that Wikipedia articles have reached the number one spot in tons of topic searches on Google, so it's no surprise that Google would want to capitalize on some of those pageviews for themselves. But with the introduction of revenue and having placed the responsibility for content directly in the hands of just one author per article, Knols is a decidedly different from Wikipedia, but the aim for Google seems obvious: to capture an authoritative place in search results for reference content that currently belongs to Wikipedia. While the general public can't currently browse Knols, we're still curious: How do you feel about Knols? Are you happy to bow down to your Google overlords, or does the Wikipedia-competitor rub you the wrong way? Competition almost always means good things for users, but let's hear your thoughts in the comments.

2007 is almost done and gone, and in the land of search it’s time for the annual year-end reviews. Both Yahoo and Ask.com have already revealed their 2007 search trends data, and now Google has finally made their 2007 Year-End Zeitgest available for public consumption.

One week ago, Google revealed the “Fastest Rising U.S. Search Terms”, and another global list, which they have now included as a part of their year-end review. If you need a quick refresher on those, check out the chart below. The list of the fastest rising global search terms has some things in common with the U.S., but is slightly different. However, comparing the two lists shows that the iPhone, Facebook, Webkinz, and Club Penguin were worldwide phenomenons in 2007, and not just American fads.

Fastest Rising (U.S.)

1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

Fastest Rising (global)

1. iphone
2. badoo
3. facebook
4. dailymotion
5. webkinz
6. youtube
7. ebuddy
8. second life
9. hi5
10. club penguin

Fastest Falling (global)
1. world cup*
2. mozart
3. fifa
4. rebelde*
5. kazaa
6. xanga
7. webdetente
8. sudoku
9. shakira
10. mp3

So now you know the fastest rising and fastest falling search terms of the year, but what about the overall most popular terms? (more…)

Google has always tried to be a bit different than other search powered portals, insisting first that it is not a portal and then either launching its portal-esque offerings such as GMail on April Fools Day or building up its messaging service, Google Talk, to be some revolutionary communications tool when its, well, an IM service with VOIP.

Then Google decides to get into other portal channels like Finance (which they aptly named Google Finance) and Videos (which is constantly morphing itself from a pay per view channel to hosted content to a video search engine) and now Google is stepping up to finaly admit that Google Products (which sounds like products made by Google) is simply all about Shopping, using a much more brandable and customer friendly tag : Google Shopping.

Let’s hope someone at Google takes the initiative to change Google Products into Google Shopping, not only to make comparing ans searching for products on Google much more consumer friendly, but so shopping feed optimization specialists like Brian Smith do not have to constantly explain the nuances between Google Base, Google Products and Froogle … and can just easily say optimization for “Google Shopping” while everyone in the room nods in agreement.

Google has added the ability to preview the ads that will run on a publisher's site and to block those they don't want to appear, the AdSense blog announced today.

This effort at improving transparency could help publishers and avoid sites advertising on a publisher's site that they do not feel are a good fit.

"In an effort to provide you with more transparency and control over the ads appearing on your pages, we've developed the Ad Review Center. This new feature, which we'll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site's users," the blog stated.

Click to read the rest of this post...

Seems Google has turned its eyes on the Wikipedia space and has a spin that may get a lot of attention from knowledgeable authors.

They just announced a beta project called "Knol" - a unit of knowledge - that gets experts in various field to write for an aggregated collection of knowledge. Why sign on for this project as opposed to Wikipedia etc.? Well Google has smartly added bylines - their articles will reference the author which could have all sorts of future implications.

Who wouldn't want to be listed as an expert on a topic by Google?

"Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project," the Google Blog explained.

Click to read the rest of this post...

YouTube has quietly added a visual "related videos" feature that, while not as efficient as smart text searching, does help you find videos in the same realm as the one you're watching. To enable the feature (which doesn't appear on all videos), click the full-screen button on the lower right corner of the video. In the full-screen window, click the network-type button next to the play button. It functions similar to Musicovery in its methods—and probably in its potential for procrastination, so beware. For more non-standard YouTube search options, check out VDoogle and Qooqle.

Move over, Jimbo - we're in the content biz now

Whatever you think about the kooks at Wikipedia - the crazed Goths banning chunks of Utah, a COO prone to drunken rampages and embezzlement, and a Roi Soleil answering to himself - one thing is in no doubt. The project has saved Google's original business.…

Google will soon launch its Knowledge Portal which is in more ways than one similar to Wikipedia. Codename: Knol, which stands for a “unit of knowledge” will mobilize the power of individidual web citizens to populate its knowledge portal with relevant and authoritative information/article about their field of specialization.

Google’s Knol is currently in “by-invitation-only-beta” with several people already invited to try out Google’s new product.

Explaining Knol further, the new knowledge portal is aimed at covering all possible branches of knowledge that anyone can think of (very Wikipedia-ish), from scientific concepts to medical information, geographical or historical facts, entertainment and product information to the more direct how-to-instructions.

(more…)

Aaron at SEO Book has partnered with Wordtracker to release a new & improved keyword tracking tool just in time for the holidays (forgive me, I’m in Panera right now listening to Bing Crosby, sitting across from a Christmas tree and eating a chocolate chip cookie … so I’m full of holiday cheer this morning)!

SEO Book’s new Keyword Tool (or THE Keyword Tool) is a vast improvement says Aaron, as after talking to Wordtracker about how unreliable the Yahoo Keyword Suggestion tool is, Wordtracker worked with AWall to develop this new free tool. (more…)

A Google feature that lets you pick and choose certain informational sites to show up in your first page of results has made an unannounced comeback. Subscribed Links, formerly known as Search Add-ons, has been enabled in at least the U.S. version of Google, so those with a Google account can now pick from nearly 50 sites to place in their results. If you subscribe to CalorieLab, for example, searching for "calories cheerios" will bring up an info box from CalorieLab as the fourth result. To enable Subscribed Links, click the "Preferences" link next to the main search box on the plain or iGoogle home pages.

User Interfaces to search engines have not undergone much change since the last decade. When it comes to searching for URLs, perhaps the vanilla single-text-box-list-of-result UI is the best we need. But for image search and more importantly media search, more innovative interface designs are possible. Proof for that is Imagery, a neat UI on top of Google Image Search created by Eliazar Parra Cardenas, who was irritated with the wasted space when googling for images .

The various options available when searching images are :

1. Clicking on an image adds it to a column at the bottom of the screen.
2. Hovering on an image displays the size of actual image and along with that the option to go to the source or just the image.
3. Images for the ‘next’ batch are added to the ones already on the screen.

In addition there are the options to choose the file type, color, size and to set filters on the returned results of images. (more…)

Video marketing is not only one of today’s leading means to market a service, product or business online but it is positioned to become even more of a driving force within the search marketing industry.

One of the most successful and long term ways to build your brand, build your channel and video views on YouTube is the power behind the subscriber. Internet marketers are well aware of the power behind subscribers, hence their long relationship with their FeedBurner accounts and history in email marketing. This will serve as a guide to using YouTube to initiate subscribers for your video channel. (more…)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Martin Veitch the Inquirer, Friday 14 December 2007. 11:01:00

Plans in-house rival

WIKIPEDIA has always divided critics between "wisdom of crowds" idealists and "Wackypedia" naysayers but now Google would appear to want a chance to divide them too. The G-men are planning a rival for the community encyclopedia and the result could well change the way hundreds of millions of us use...

“Knol”, just announced a the official Google blog, is a currently private, invitation-only knowledge sharing service. Google says that a Knol is a “unit of knowledge,"* and in the style of the old-school About.com website, experts are invited to the service to write an introductory article on a subject of their expertise. Google wants to provide all the tools to write this, and host the content and so on, so that experts can focus just on the content. Then, ad revenues those pages generate can be shared.

Knol pages will be made available for indexing by search engines, Google announced, including appearing in Google search itself. Google’s Udi Manber says, “Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results.” (It’s not 100% clear from that statement if Google will treat Knol pages as just another organic web source, or give them some kind of special onebox, or special organic result formatting.)

Also, Knols can be released under a Creative Commons license, if the screenshot** is right. It’s good to see Google finally starting to utilize this type of licensing (as many of their services still lack it).

Group efforts vs single authors

One key aspect of Knol, according to Google’s Udi Manber, is that the authors of articles will be prominently displayed:

<<Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors – but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.>>

That’s partly a strawman argument – author names are included in many blog posts and news articles already today. However, if Udi is talking about Wikipedia, he may have a point.

On systems like Wikipedia, which already serves great introductory articles for a multitude of subjects, the page is a true group effort with no single author being credited as lead. Knols (one knol, two knols...?) seem to take a different route. This could become a problem with Knol, too: if a single author takes the lead, and all edits must go through that person, the article may not end up as fact-checked and up-to-date as a Wikipedia counterpart may. Even with peer reviews and potential edit suggestions that may be submitted to the author – the screenshot provided by Google, as pictured above, Wikipedia-style “Edit” links, and Google says people will be able “to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content” – the incentive to edit someone else’s article may be much lower than to help edit an article that is disclosed to be a real group project.

Then again, Knol seems to want to offer incentive for experts in terms of recognition, and money as well, two aspects lacking in Wikipedia. Also, if projects like Wikipedia get some good large-scale competition, it might help Wikipedia too. At this time, Wikipedia’s editing tools for instance are somewhat cluttered and don’t have the best usability. If Google takes away experts from Wikipedia because they provide easier tools, then maybe it helps improve Wikipedia in return.

(Not that experts of a subject would really need a new service badly – they can already create a website on their domain using a variety of tools, and throw in some ads. What may make Knol better for this, depending on how well it’s implemented, is the kind of tool set offered for editing... and potentially, the way Knol results are highlighted in search results. For those who care about search results neutrality, that part may become an area to watch in the future.)

Google claims they won’t be playing moderator

In terms of what content is appropriate for the Knol project, Google claims “Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content.” Past projects of this nature at Google have shown however that is not completely the case; there’s usually a policy disallowing certain content, sometimes leading to banned pages... think Google Page Creator, Blogger, or Google Groups***.

One of the last times Google tried to unite experts around the world for a project of theirs was for Google Answers, a paid Q&A service that has been canceled in the meantime. Let’s see how “Knol” fares.

[Thanks Beussery and Mathias Schindler! Screenshot by Google.]

*Sounds more like the name of planet from a sci-fi novel. Not that that’s bad.

**If the screenshot’s fonts are indicative of the final layout, I think the main text is too small.

***Quote from the Google Groups terms of service: “If Google discovers Content that does not appear to conform to the Terms of Service, Google may investigate and determine in good faith and in its sole discretion whether to remove the Content.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

The Google Webmaster Tools site has a new section found at Diagnostics -> Content Analysis. It will highlight potential problems with your site in regards to issues like overlong page titles, titles that are too short, duplicate titles, duplicate meta descriptions, non-indexable content issues (e.g. a page containing mostly only an image) and more.

Another new section is Sitemaps -> Sitemap details, listing “any errors or warnings that were encountered when specific pages from your Sitemap were crawled,” as the Google Webmaster Central blog writes.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google will be rolling out a feature called Ad Review Center to AdSense accounts over the coming months, they announced. This service seems to be aimed at webmasters who find some of the ads Google chooses for their sites too annoying and irrelevant (think blinking “find a partner” Flash ads on a news site, for instance). However, you will not be able to review every ad, but only those which are placement-targeted to your site.

If you do block an ad – and lose revenues that ad may have generated otherwise (or if you’re lucky, free the spot for better, more successful ads) – you will be able to select some feedback in regards to your reasons, Google says, which in turn can be check by the advertiser. Note with the Ad Review Center, you may also optionally choose to pre-moderate any new placement-targeted ad.

To see if you have this feature already, log-in to AdSense and switch to AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter. That much is old, but on that page you may one day find a new, green box with a link reading Ad Review Center (I don’t have it yet).

So, more choice is good, I guess. It might also be nice if Google would allow webmasters using AdSense to perhaps describe, in general terms, the kind of ads they want to allow on their site. Right now you can only determine the ad size, and whether or not you accept images, but you cannot, for instance, toggle options like “Flash allowed” or “animations allowed.” (And once the Ad Review option collects enough feedback from webmasters, Google could even offer an option in the style of “automatically block all ads which get blocked manually a lot”... sort of like a spam filter for advertisement.)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

If you think the Yahoo shortcuts for bloggers is way to cool, well here’s another one tool from Yahoo which would certainly be very helpful for Flickr photo uploaders.

Flickr Pro account holders will now have more control on whose using their uploaded photos with the new “stats” feature of Flickr. 

As the Flickr Stat FAQ puts it:

“…your stats on Flickr are designed to give you insight into the ways that people are finding your photos. There are stats available for people surfing on Flickr itself - where the referrer is flickr.com - and stats about people coming from other websites. We can show you the sorts of things people search for on search engines where your photos turn up, and tell you how many views your photos have in a week, or for all time.” 

Isn’t that neat? Flickr pro account holders will need to activate the stats feature in order to get those useful stats from their photos. After activating, wait for 24 hours and the stats full feature will be activated. 

The cool thing about this new Flickr tool is that you can check the referrer link presented in the stats and see how your photos are used in the referrer’s site. You would also know whether your photos were used illegally. 

Here are some more facts about the statistical figures to be displayed by the Flickr Stats:

• Stats are updated once a day
• Account holders  views of own photos are not counted
• Views and referrers when a page on flickr.com is loaded are tracked
• Views of  photos on external sites (like your blog) are not being tracked
•  The “Search Engines” group of referrers counts traffic from most of the major search engines online, including Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, Ask.com, and live.com
• When reading search engine results, what people searched for to find users’  content are shown
• links to individual Flickr members as referrers are not displayed

I’m still awaiting the approval of my account’s stats. Will update this post with actual live stats when my activation is approved.

A Google Maps search may now return location markers showing videos from YouTube, books from Google Book search, or geo-tagged photos from Panoramio*. Try the query google geyser, for instance, and you will find the blue placemark’s info window will embed a YouTube video for direct playback... possibly retrieved because the description, tags or title of the video contained the keywords in question as well as location information (the description reads “Drove by Google’s Mt View corp campus today found a Geyser,” and tags include mountain view).

The integration of the YouTube results looks very half-baked, as the screenshot shows (there’s not enough padding between thumbnail and description, the thumbnail is redundant in the first place because the embedded video contains a preview still already, the embedded video is too large for the info window, etc.).

To see book results, Google at the official Google Lat Long blog suggests you search for christmas books in jerusalem. Photo results can be pulled up by searching for e.g. big ben in london.

*Panoramio is a Google property as well; let’s see if Google will index and display other photo and video properties in their maps results too, like data from Flickr, for instance. The quality of Google’s services will suffer if they become too self-referential.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

The Productivity Portfolio blog covers how send your Outlook calendar in an email in a format that anyone—even non-Outlook users—can open. Everyone's got wacky work and life schedules around the holidays, so you may want to dash off your calendar to a co-worker or client before you go. In short, Outlook attaches an .ISC file to the outgoing email, which the recipient can open in iCal, Google Calendar, or any app that supports iCalendar files. Handy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting this week or next, Google will be adding blogs as new feature in its Universal Search results. What’s this mean? According to Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience, search queries on Google will now return links to blogs alongside the images, books, local maps, video, and news.

Google’s Universal Search initiative was kicked-off May 16 of this year, and the addition of blogs to the results marks the first new genre of results to be included since its launch. The Universal Search system is the result of an arduous five-year effort to completely re-vamp the company’s search algorithms, which blends results from their various content sources.

Blogs have been gaining significant momentum and notoriety over the past few years, and it is only fitting that they too be included amongst the Universal Search results. Other search engines have followed suite, with Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask all upgrading their algorithms and services this year to include more dynamic, relevant results. (more…)

There is no specific immediate need to do this, but if you are using Google Analytics for your traffic tracking, Google asks you to update the tracker script from this (replace YOURNUMBER with your ID, as contained in your old tracker code)...

... to this:

The old code will still work though for at least another year, according to Google. Google says they “recommend you use for all new accounts and new profiles for new domains. ... This will allow you to take advantage of the most up-to-date tracking functionality as it is added to Google Analytics.” (A migration guide in PDF format explains more.)

As another change to Google Analytics – no matter which tracking code you are using – you can now graph two metrics against each other, say, visits vs page views. Click the arrow button to the top right of your main visits chart to set this up.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Yahoo worked on this Plugin with the help of Wordpress, and being a lifelong Wordpress user (SEJ first started on Blogger, then switched to b2; which became Wordpress) I thought it my duty to not only report on the Plugin itself (with the help of SEJ’s Search News Anchor Julie Kent), but also test and use what I feel is one of the most efficient and useful Wordpress Plugins - especially for a third party branded plugin and its Flickr images tool.

Another note is that although the Yahoo Shortcuts Plugin is branded by Yahoo and serves content from Yahoo properties like Flickr, the plugin does not serve Yahoo advertisements and is not against the Google AdSense Terms of Service, for those bloggers who run Google AdSense.

If your Wordpress.org powered blog is hosted on your own server or domain, you’ll have to download and install the plugin. The plugin is not yet available for blogs hosted on Wordpress.com.

After installing the Wordpress Plugin, activating it and then opening a new entry to write a post, the Yahoo Shortcuts Plugin box appears on the right side of my Wordpress admin area, but without any matching Shortcuts since this entry is empty.

Then, the initial draft of this post is typed, and Yahoo then automatically identifies 14 different Shortcuts which can be entered into the post.

I then select the option to add these Shortcuts and preview them. Since this is a post for reviewing the new Yahoo Shortcuts Plugin, I now will ‘Convert all links to badges’. (The blogger can however pick and choose which Shortcuts they want to include or delete. A lot of the shortcuts are to Yahoo Search results and not all to embedded maps or graphs, so if the blogger does not want all of these links to Yahoo Search results, they should look into whether or not they want to include them. (more…)

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• Putting the "Social" in Social Media Marketing
  Reaching out to bloggers and building a relationship with them can go a long way in improving your social media efforts, your search ranking, and your overall marketing plan.
• Newsknife ranks top news sites in Google News for 2007
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Canadian cable and telecom giant Rogers Communications has begun testing new technology on its high-speed internet service that inserts Rogers-centric messages and advertisements on third-party websites. While that in itself is enough to piss off the likes of Google, who pride themselves on a clutter-free homepage, the fact that the messages carry the name of Rogers’ co-branded high-speed internet service with Yahoo, is even more upsetting to the search giant.

The People For Internet Responsibility (PFIR) first unveiled the testing of the new technology, and on their blog PFIR posted a screenshot depicting the degradation of the Google homepage with a Yahoo-lovin’ message notifying a user that he was approaching his monthly data limit. The name of Google’s archenemy, Yahoo, shows up twice on the page.

Rogers’ recently confirmed their underhanded move to The Toronto Star, but defended the practice. Rogers argues that it’s a lot like a wireless provider sending messages to a customer’s cell phone. Although I would argue that it is not quite the same thing, as a message to one’s phone would go into a text message inbox, and not take away from the viewing area on your phone’s screen. (more…)

Dear Lifehacker,
I love that I can mute a conversation in Gmail I'm no longer interested in by hitting the M key. But once I mute something from my chatty co-workers, what if I change my mind? How do I unmute if that "Undo" link is long gone?
Signed,
Mute Regret

Yamli.com is a search engine front-end where you can search the Arabic-language web, but using Latin letters... which are then dynamically transliterated into Arabic, and forwarded to a Google search. Ramibotros, who pointed this out in the forum, explains:

<<When we, arabic-speaking tounges , mail/sms/chat together, we often prefer to write how the arabic word would sound like but in latin words (pronouncation rules often following English rules), which is called transliteration i think. We also represent pronouncations exclusive to the arabic tounge using numbers such as 2, 7 , etc..>>

Wikipedia explains more. Ramibotros adds:

<<I always thought Google needed such a tool because:

1) For some, it is much more convenient to search using the latin characters. And sometimes one is even stuck with a keyboard with arabic characters.
2) A lot of webpages are _written_ in the transliterated form already, which is worth being indexed and found – perhaps through converting them.
3) It would be useful for an arabic query to be searched for using BOTH forms ..>>

[Thanks Ramibotros!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google has been testing the placement of product and video results on the right side of the Google results page, which is valuable real estate usually reserved for AdWords ads.

ValleyWag has the scoop with some screen captures of the limited test (I’m going to link to ValleyWag at the bottom of this post because I want to make a point), which cleans up the normal serps, making them organic web pages again, and differentiates the video and product searches, in what may be an ongoing tweak in the Google UI.

Google has become cluttered with too much media overflow in its results, and these changes are overwhleming the average user. The tests it is conducting seem to address this issue, and in line with its original Universal Search plans, Google is testing alternative yet monetarily efficient ways to better their user experience.

Personally, most of the time, I am not conducting searches for videos or images, but information, and prefer the differentiation between such listings. I hope that I’m not alone in this respect.

Of course Ask.com has been practicing this discipline for a long time, serving what we would consider ‘Universal Results’ to the right of normal search listings and Smart Answers above search. If Google does change over to this new style, we have Ask.com to think for first going live with this better format.

This brings back memories of the presentation that Bill Slawski was showing a Google patent on mixing search results, with images and other multimedia to the right side of the web results.

Here is an image from the patent (notice that products are served on the right):

Looks almost EXACTLY like the screen caps from Google’s tests today. Wow, the power of patents and foreseeing future changes!

Now, here’s the link to the ValleyWag Screenshots. Notice any similarities?

Nick Farrell the Inquirer, Thursday 13 December 2007. 16:20:00

Google anti-trust investigation objections

THE ABILITY of the US FTC to investigate Google's $3.1 billion purchase of Doubleclick has been called into question by two consumer groups. Doubleclick pays Jones Day for all its legal needs. At the outfit is a partner John Majoras who just happens to be the hubby of Deborah Platt...

Tony Dennis the Inquirer, Thursday 13 December 2007. 14:56:00

Wapple waps Google with added WAP ad competition

WAPPLE, provider of free, advert-sponsored mobile internet sites said it now offers a choice four mobile advertising partners. To date, most of Wapple's free mobile websites have been primarily funded by Google Adsense. Now, in addition to Google, there's: Admob, Admoda and Decktrade....