Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

In yet another attempt to stay relevant and find a way to make as much money as possible from the large amount of traffic they receive, Yahoo has launched a new “blog-inspired site” called Shine.

According to a SEL post about Shine:

It’s a broad mix of content from publisher partners such as Hearst Communications, Rodale, and Condé Nast. It also aggregates and links to third party content and is encouraging users to blog on the site. Unlike Yahoo content-specific sites like Food, Shine is a kind of meta-vertical and focuses on a key Internet audience: women aged 25 to 54.

In all honesty, I did not find the news of Shine’s launch particularly interesting. However, my interest was significantly piqued after I read a post by Jason Calacanis about the announcement.

In true Calacanis fashion, Jason took an extremely strong stance on this news:

Ummm….. hello!?!?!? isn’t Yahoo’s business to PARTNER with sites like Jane and the WSJ? Isn’t the point of the Yahoo Publisher Network to support and grow publishers and newspapers!??! What next a consumer electronics site to compete with Engadget and Gizmodo, or a sports site to compete with ESPN and Sportsline? A gossip site to compete with PerezHIlton and Gawker?

(in fact, Yahoo already has a celebrity gossip website called OMG)

Jason goes on to compare and discuss Google’s approach to Yahoo’s:

Folks at Google make a point of letting partners know they will NEVER move into the content space and compete with them. They understand that the partnership with content creators is greater than taking the business away from them. That’s why publisher are so upset with Google for even considering launching KNOL. If I were Google I would NOT launch Knol… it’s going to really jeopardize Google’s relationships with publishers.

It’s Google sole focus on search and Yahoo’s continued drifting that shows why Yahoo makes less money than Google with more traffic.

A new post today from SEO ROI confirms a rumor that has been floating around the blog-o-sphere for quite awhile: Google is indexing site searches.

As inferred by the second paragraph of Gabriel’s post:

Google Analytics is broken (like PageRank is broken), and leaking my data into the index. All the site searches here on SEO ROI are resulting in site-SERPs pages getting into G’s index.

the initial culprit was thought to be Google Analytics. However, after the post was published, Matt Cutts & Mike VanDeMar both contacted Gabriel with evidence that this was also happening on websites not using Google Analytics. (In the case of Mike VanDeMar, his site searches were being indexed even though he had never used Google Analytics).

According to one of the comments left on the post, this has been around for several months. The commenter (Tim Dineen), goes on to say:

Google is performing automatic searches, using the intern search function of some CMS (I have only noticed in on wordpress so far). They even perform searches for keywords that are absolutely unique and nonsense (like nicknames mentioned somewhere on your blog) and this internal search pages can rank in the SERP!

Matt Cutts also informed Gabriel that he “will try” to get a post up on Google’s Webmaster blog about this, so hopefully this issue will be resolved in a reasonable amount of time. In the meantime, Gabriel explains how a blackhat SEO could have a field day with this glitch:

While if I were a blackhat this would be great - I’d automate bots to search for keywords on my sites, have Google Analytics push it all into the index, then linkspam my SERPs - I’m a white-ish SEO with the coding skills of a luddite.

Continuing with the theme of emphasizing the importance of online video, today’s latest news is about YouTube’s new analytics.

Last night, Google announced YouTube Insight. With Insight, anyone with a YouTube account can:

view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

The Google post goes on to give a nice corporate pitch about the benefits of Insight:

Insight gives the creators an inside look into the viewing trends of their videos on YouTube, and helps them to increase views and become more popular. Partners can evaluate metrics to better serve and understand their audiences, as well as increase ad revenue. And advertisers can study their metrics and successes to tailor their marketing — both on and off the site — and reach the right viewers. As a result, Insight turns YouTube into one of the world’s largest focus groups.

While the second part of their post is a little too much hype for my taste, I do feel that Insight will help publishers gain increased exposure for their videos. Although the current basic statistics can be quite useful if analyzed properly, hopefully Insight will continue to gain new features over time.

To access these stats, click the “About this Video” button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.

Although Google had announced their new AdWords video ads in February, there had not been any reports of video ads being seen within Google’s search results.

However, Barry Schwartz from SEL posted screen shots this morning from Google’s search results that finally show integrated video ads.

According to his post, he found that the search results for cell phone, smart phones and phones all contained video ads.

Barry later added this Postscript to his post:

Google Operating System posted screen captures of examples of video ads for a search on laptop by Intel. So there are more examples, we just need to find them all.

As with the standard AdWords program, advertisers pay on a CPC basis. “The click” is counted as each time a video ad is watched.

Here’s a recording of an ad in action that Barry referenced in his Postscript:

Earlier today, Yahoo, MySpace and Google made a new announcement about the OpenSocial platform.

The three companies “have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.”

The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

If you’re interested, you can read the full OpenSocial Foundation Intent Agreement.

Although Yahoo, MySpace and Google will all be working together on this initiative, Facebook has formally declined to participate in this program. CNET reported the following statement from Facebook:

As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation,” a statement from the company read. “The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience.

If you are an AdWords advertiser, you need to be extremely careful if you receive an email from “Google” about your AdWords account.

SER is reporting that a new round of AdWords phishing emails appeared over the weekend.

Here’s an exact copy of what the email looks like:

Dear Google AdWords Customer!

In order to update your billing information, please sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com, and update your billing information. Your account will be reactivated as soon as you have entered your payment details. Your ads will show immediately if you decide to pay for clicks via credit or debit card. If you decide to pay by direct debit, we may need to receive your signed debit authorization before your ads start running, depending on your location. If you choose bank transfer, your ads will show as soon as we receive your first payment. (Payment options vary by location.) Thank you for choosing AdWords. We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team
————————
This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message. If you have any questions after following the steps above, please visit the Google AdWords Help Center at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8336&hl=en_US to find answers to frequently asked questions and a ‘contact us’ link near the bottom of the page.

Although this email looks legitimate, if you click the https://adwords.google.com link, you will actually be taken to: http://adwords.google.com.fr4ck.cn/select/Login/

Google representatives have stated that if you receive one of these emails, you should report it to Google AdWords Support.

The winners of the 700MHz auction were announced yesterday.

If you’re not familiar with the 700MHz auction, Wikipedia has an article that summarizes all the key points of this issue.

As expected by most, Verizon and AT&T were the main winners of the auction.

However, even though Google placed bids but did not obtain any of the actual spectrum, they were also big winners in this auction.

So how can Google be considered a winner when they didn’t actually get any of the spectrum. According to SEL, the reason that Google announced they would be bidding a “minimum of $4.6 billion” was because they wanted to “help ensure openness of the 700MHz spectrum and networks that used it.”

Google had originally proposed four openness provisions, and was successful in getting the following two:

–Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;

–Open devices: Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;

In case you haven’t caught on, these openness provisions make Google a winner because “the nationwide network will now be open to any device, which ensures that phones built on the Google-sponsored Android platform will have a home even if no US carrier officially offers or promotes them.”

As I’ve previously mentioned, video is the future of the internet. Therefore, it’s vital for you and your business to stay on top of the latest online video trends.

The latest news in online video was noticed yesterday by Stephen Espinosa. If you have Google Local Business Center profile, instead of hoping that Google will make one of your videos show up within your profile, you can now directly add multiple videos.

Whether its a commercial, demo or testimonial from a customer, Google is allowing you to enhance the experience of people that visit your listing by giving them the opportunity to interact with your videos.

For those of you that like all your information in one place, SEL has a step-by-step list of how to add a video to your profile:

Step 1: Go and edit your current verified Google Local Business Center profile.

Step 2: Go to the “photos” tab

Step 3: Scroll to the bottom of the form and look for the video section

Step 4: Find a YouTube video and copy and paste the URL into the field and click “add video.”

Step 5: Repeat Step 4 up to five times and you will begin to see videos show up under the “add video” box

Although I had never even heard of this search engine before today, Gigablast actually made headlines on two different blogs throughout the day.

The first mention of Gigablast that I came across today was on the Search Engine Journal. According to the SEJ post, Gigablast “just released the findings of their search “taste test” where the majority of study participants, over 55%, found the Gigablast search results to be as good as, or better than, search results from Google.”

The post goes on to provide the following details:

* The study compared Gigablast’s and Google’s search results side-by-side, without brand names or logos, with over 220 participants.

* Forty-eight sample search queries were used, with the queries comprising an unbiased selection of the top queries of 2007, as reported by Google’s own Google Zeitgeist service.

* The majority of study participants were from North America (approximately 73% of participants).

Given that Gigablast performed this study themselves, I was obviously skeptical of these claims. After testing the search engine for myself, I do agree with the study’s second claim that Gigablast was preferred by a majority over Ask.com, but I personally feel that while their results aren’t bad, they don’t bring anything to the table that Google doesn’t already offer.

The second mention of Gigablast that I noticed today was on the blog of Bill Hartzer. This post simply announced that “Gigablast has officially launched their fresh and comprehensive site search for websites. If you have a website you can now provide a free site search as well as web search for your site’s visitors.” Once again, this is all fine and well, but Google has been offering this same feature for several years.

Last November, Google announced that they would be allowing registered users to move the pushpin markers to correct or improve the accuracy of business locations.

Because this policy has worked well for Google, they announced yesterday that registered “users will now be able to edit any of the details about a business or location or add new businesses, even if they’re not the business owner.”

According to the Search Engine Land post about this news:

I asked Hanke the standard question about maliciousness, but in a very specific context. The hypothetical we discussed is a competitor swapping out his or her phone number for that of another business. For example, local Florist A ranks better and is getting more calls from Google than Flower Shop B. So Flower Shop B, having cleverly discovered the open-editing capability, replaces Florist A’s phone number with its own to siphon off calls from its competitor.

Hanke said that all the changes are recorded and preserved in the system so they can be tracked and observed. It’s also the case that users have to register to make any changes, which creates a further disincentive. He added that changes are monitored and moderated internally. The malicious competitor would likely be caught under those circumstances.

As a postscript to this post, SEL added that “once a listing has been claimed by a business owner it cannot be edited, which should give businesses both comfort and an incentive to claim and correct their listings.”

Here are two videos that explain adding and editing places in Google Maps: