posted by pittfall in blog on July 4th, 2008
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posted by pittfall in search engines, sem on July 2nd, 2008 » 6 Comments
Microsoft still wants to purchase Yahoo!, however, now their true intentions are becoming more visible:
There’s yet another chapter in what’s beginning to look like an eternal corporate love triangle: Seems Microsoft just can’t get past it’s obsession with Yahoo’s search business, at least according to The Wall Street Journal.
It reports Microsoft is looking to team up with News Corp. or Time Warner to buy Yahoo. They would then bust up the company with Microsoft keeping the search business.
The idea that Microsoft might team up with News Corp or Time Warner, regardless of the new relationship with online ad revenue sharing with Google, to buy Yahoo! might help with Carl Ichan’s quest to sell Yahoo!
The other new order of business is that the Google Yahoo! agreement might be up for review, not by the SEC, but by the Justice Department:
Google’s proposed deal with Yahoo is being looked at by the Justice Department because of antitrust issues and many Yahoo shareholders would like to see Microsoft move in.
From Information Week:
When the deal was announced, Google and Yahoo said they had agreed to delay it for three months to allow the Justice Department time to review the arrangement. It may be that the investigation is nothing more than the government’s acceptance of that invitation. Indeed, that’s how Google sees it.
In an e-mailed statement, Google said, “We are continuing to have cooperative discussions with the Department of Justice about this arrangement and voluntarily delayed implementation for three and a half months in order to give them time to understand the agreement. That process is continuing exactly as expected. We are confident that the arrangement is beneficial to competition, but we are not going to discuss the details of the process.”
But according to the Post, the formal investigation undertaken by the Justice Department represents more significant scrutiny than the sort of pro forma review that the two companies appear to have anticipated.
Whatever the case, Google has already weathered a similar antitrust review as a consequence of its decision to acquire DoubleClick.
What are your thoughts?
Will, or should the Google-Yahoo! deal go through?
Will, or should Microsoft keep up efforts to purchase Yahoo!?
Does it even matter anymore?
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posted by pittfall in tools on June 19th, 2008 » 8 Comments
AT&T stepped into the online realm last year with the purchase of ingenio, and now they have launched their very own browser called Pogo, now in invitation only beta. TechCrunch has invitations for this limited beta.
Essentially, it looks and acts a lot like Firefox. Here are a few screenshots from the new browser:
Pogo Start
Springboard - Home pages (multiple) start with your list of important pages to choose from.
Springboard
History - Pogo offers your search history visualized with screen shots from the websites you’ve visited.
History
Bookmarks - Visualized bookmarks with screen shots fro all of your bookmarks.
Bookmarks
New Cells - Instead of tabs, additional open windows are called cells.
New Cells
Pogo is a 3D web browser created in collaboration between AT&T’s business development group and Vizible. We weren’t particularly impressed when we reviewed it a few months ago, but a new version has since been released.
If you get your hands on it, feel free to let me know how you feel about it!
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I have begun playing with twitter. In it’s honor, this post abides by their rules of 140 characters or less. Free to follow me pittfall.
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posted by pittfall in search engines, seo on June 15th, 2008 » 11 Comments
In October of last year, Google made some major adjustments to PageRank because of paid links, then in November, Google noted that buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and asked for webmasters to report them. I have heard, since this time, from a few sources, that this may not be the case consistently, but I was unable to validate these any of these.
Recently, while doing research, a friend inquired about some link behaviors that appeared to be purchased links, however with a little bit of searching he found that these links appeared to pass an ample amount of value to the site. This was not for a low volume search term:
- Search Term - “engagement rings“
- Daily Search Volume
KeywordDiscovery - 1,682
WordZe - 1,498
WordTracker - 5,432
Google Trends “engagement rings”
OK, I know what many of you might be thinking, “this is probably under the radar,” right? Not so much…
This website, along with others are clients of a SEO, design and marketing service, here, with a list of clients that utilize a site-wide block of links that are consistent on most of these websites without the “no follow” tags or any reference that they are sponsored. Many of these also engage in exchanging links to non-relevant websites. This also led to finding another grouping of a link exchange network, that state “PageRank boosts benefit both sides and is a win-win situation for all.”
Back to the action…
Doing a quick analysis of the website in question, www.mysolitaire.com, also gives insight into other concerns with the relevance of search results.
Links
Google - 309 (predominately from link exchanges and site-wide blocks)
Yahoo - 13,810 (same as Google plus lots of blog links and pages of only links)
On Page
28 instances of “engagement rings”
2 - title
3 - meta keywords
2 - meta description
3 - content (included in “h” tags at bottom of page)
10 - alt tags (many in spacer or non-ring images)
4 - text links
4 - table summary
So, what does this all mean? The question is whether Google is concerned with paid links, site-wide links that are passing PageRank, irrelevant sites linking to move websites to the top?
Is this blackhat behavior? In my opinion, this is as gray as it comes?
Is this a valid reason for reporting to Google?
Does this fit within the Google Webmaster Guidelines as a “link scheme?”
Examples of link schemes can include:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
What are your thoughts?
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