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The co-founder of the search engine Yahoo!, which first appeared back in 1995, has announced his resignation, effective immediately, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Jerry Yang owns a 3.6 per cent stake in the Yahoo! – a popular platform for search engine marketing initiatives – and has been on the board of directors since March 1995. He also acted as the company’s CEO between June 2007 and January 2009.
Writing in a letter to Yahoo! board chairman, Roy Bostock, Yang said: “My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life.
“However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as chief executive officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Search engine giant Google is in the process of unveiling the most significant changes to its home page that it has ever made, according to an article published by BBC News.
The latest changes see the black bar – running horizontally across the top of screen – removed and replaced with a simple grey logo.
When users click or highlight the logo, a drop down menu appears listing Google’s seven other services. There is also an option to bring up eight additional services.
First announced towards the back-end of last year, Google – a popular platform for search engine marketing initiatives – is unveiling the changes in a gradual roll-out, meaning only a limited number of users will currently see the new features.
Commentators and analysts have said that the move has been taken to allow Google to highlight its other services – without causing the home page to become cluttered.
A Google spokesman commented: “Constant revision and improvement is part our overarching philosophy.”
He added: “If you compare the original Google home page to today’s version, you will see that a makeover every so often can certainly be refreshing.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Recent research released by Experian Hitwise has revealed that the percentage of one-word search queries has increased, according to an article published by Search Engine Watch.
Hitwise’s data has shown that one-word queries previously accounted for 20.3 per cent of search activity in January 2009; this figure now stands at 27.7 per cent in October 2011 – a significant increase.
This has led Paul Burani, writing for SEW, to attempt to provide an explanation behind the increase in one-word search queries.
He firstly attributes the rise to the growth in mobile search – with around a quarter of those making searches on mobiles inputting just a one-word query. However, this theory can be discounted as Hitwise’s data excludes mobile devices.
Burani also offers the increase in URLs being used as keywords as an explanation, as well as improved geographic targeting – which has impacted on SEO.
Despite this, Burani eventually concludes that: “We can deconstruct these trends until we’re blue in the face, but in all likelihood the behavioral insight here has less to do with the search engine, and more with the resulting action.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Rumours surrounding the potential sale of Yahoo! have been circulating for a considerable period of time; however, it has now emerged that private equity firms, Blackstone Group and Bain Capital, along with Asian partners are in the process of preparing a fresh bid for the search engine, according to an article published by the Guardian.
Microsoft had put forward a bid as part of a consortium worth around $20 billion – lower than another received bid.
The new consortium’s bid could value Yahoo! at $25 billion, according to a Reuters source.
The new consortium would feature prominent Asian businesses including Alibaba Group from China and Softbank Corp from Japan – though final plans have yet to be confirmed.
Spokesman for Alibaba Group, John Spelich commented yesterday, stating: “Alibaba Group has not made a decision to be part of a whole company bid for Yahoo!.”
It is believed that Alibaba Group are primarily interested in buying back a 40 per cent stake currently owned by Yahoo! – a popular platform for search engine marketing initiatives.
Dick Wei, an analyst at JPMorgan commented on Alibaba’s intentions, adding: “Alibaba definitely wants to get its stake back from Yahoo!, so whatever that can make that happen, they will try for it.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
With speculation rife for months that Yahoo! is soon to be sold, Microsoft is rumoured to be working on another possible bid, this time with Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to buy the search engine, according to an article published by The Wall Street Journal.
The bid, which is currently being discussed, would see Microsoft put up the majority of the finance – around several billion dollars – with both Silver Lake Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board contributing a lesser sum to the deal; while banks would arrange the rest of the financing.
However, insiders close to the matter have revealed that should the financing plan fall through or become too complex, the deal could be abandoned.
Microsoft previously made a bid for Yahoo! back in 2008.
The bid, worth around $44.6 billion, was rejected and since then Yahoo!’s share value has plummeted – losing nearly 44 per cent of their value.
Although a reasonably popular platform for search engine marketing ventures, any potential Microsoft bid for Yahoo! will be aimed at protecting the Search Alliance partnership that the two struck up following Microsoft’s failed bid.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
The state-run Chinese newspaper People’s Daily has launched a new search engine.
Jike has been approved by the Communist ruling part of China – which had previously asked Google to censor search results for Chinese people.
Jike was named after the English word “geek”.
The company behind Jike says the technology was built pretty much from scratch.
It is not known whether the results will be censored or state-approved – which could open the Chinese markets and vastly effect online marketing - but, at the launch event for Jike, the People’s Daily said younger people were the target audience and they had designed the engine specifically to appeal to young people.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
According to searchenginejournal.com Google have added a site speed tool to its analytics to improve the quality of their service to users.
Google prides itself on speed and is reported to be obsessed with providing customers with an instant search, and its love of speed isn’t a ’suit yourself if you don’t like it’ situation, the speed will impact both Google AdWords page quality and actual Google SERP, so the company are trying to create a faster experience for all users.
In the meantime, while Google figure out ways in which to improve their speed, there are a number of search engine optimisation, code and design tactics that can help users load pages more quickly.
The site speed tracker looks at all the information related to the load speed of pages and will give you indications of which pages are loading the quickest, which browsers aren’t responding at all and which demographics are experiencing difficulty.
To take full advantage of this tool, you must enable the new Google analytics, then enable the time tracking features and you must install the new Google analytics code provided.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, PPC, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Bing, the search engine from Microsoft, have announced a new partnership with Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices to further their search options and default maps
CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer took to the stage at BlackBerry World 2011 in order to announce the new partnership. He claimed search options on future devices would be Bing and will be integrated at OS level, meaning that switching to other search engine providers is not an option for users.
Search engine marketing firms involved in BlackBerry mobile will have to alter their strategy in order to integrate with the new partnership.
A blog post from the Bing team confirms the partnership: “Central to this collaboration, Blackberry devices will use Bing as the preferred search provider in the browser and Bing will be the default search and map application for new devices presented to mobile operators, both in the United States and internationally.”
“These new experiences highlight how the mobile landscape is changing. Devices are becoming sensors that can provide real-time access to information to help people quickly complete tasks on the go.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Whilst the noise about the Google Panda update (previously called the Farmer update) is beginning to die down, there will still be many websites who should consider the value and quality of all their content and how this may reduce their chances of good listing in the SERPs.
The obvious contenders may not be those you first assume. Aged and static content that has not been updated for some time may actually be bringing in long tail traffic, so don’t just bin old pages without checking your traffic stats and backlinks for those pages first. However, it may be that your business has changed direction since that content was added and it is no longer relevant, so take a look at some of your historic content to ensure it still fits the bill.
More likely culprits for content deemed to be of low quality by the search engines are those which may seem far too similar to other pages on other sites. For instance, if you sell products with a generic product description that other companies also sell, and you have one page per product (required for inclusion in Google Shopping/Base), these product pages may not appear unique to the spiders.
A quick fix would be to add the capability for reviews and testimonials. Until those reviews begin to appear on your site, add a “no index” tag, and then manually remove this from any pages where reviews have been added. You can request reviews from your customers for products that they have purchased, which will also give you a chance to get in touch with your customers and ask for feedback.
Other low quality pages may be a links page that includes broken links, links to irrelevant content, or links which are not providing any link juice to your site. Keep a weather eye on any links on your site to ensure that these are working, relevant and worthwhile.
Check your traffic stats (analytics) to see which pages are rarely visited or have high bounce rates. Check to see why this might be the case – is navigation difficult to reach that page? Is the content out of date or off-topic for your target audience? A quick revamp of your navigation or content may be all that is required to raise the quality score for that page.
And whilst we are talking about Quality Score – take a good look at your PPC, or ensure that your internet marketing agency understands how Quality Score works. One or two keywords in your Pay Per Click campaign that are not performing as they should can have a decidedly negative effect on your QS rating, which will affect your PPC positions.
Google has announced that it will be dropping the searchwiki feature from the search engine, and introducing Google stars instead.
These work in the same way as you may have become used to with Google Mail, News and Reader. The Google blog states:
“With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant.”
For those who actually used SearchWiki, don’t worry, your edits will be saved.
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