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SEO News for December 2007 from searchenginejournal.com

Google Introduces Video Sitemaps
If you want to get your video contents searchable via Google Video Search, you better start creating sitemaps for these videos. With the Google video sitemaps, you can tell Google’s metacrawlers about all the video contents on your site, including these videos’ metadata. As defined by Google, video sitemaps: “is an extension of the Sitemap protocol that [...]

Zuula : One Site to Search Them All
Zuula is a meta search engine that presents information from multiple engines in a neat tabbed format. Its more of a portal to perform extensive search when a wide array of sources are necessary to be researched. A quote from the Zuulablog The beauty of Zuula is that, on those occasions when you want to use other [...]

Google Q&A : Rebirth of Answers Adds to Google’s Socialization
Google is taking steps to relaunch their Google Answers service as a social content generation system similar to the Yahoo Answers model, and rebrand the service as Google Q&A according to the Google Operating System Blog. The service is currently being road tested in Russia and China, but is expected to roll out soon, possibly with [...]

Microsoft Kicks-Off Online Student Avatar Playground &Competition
On Friday, Microsoft launched their “Ultimate Steal” promotion, which allows university students from around the globe to create and customize their own avatar, or digital alter-ego, at the Ultimate College All-Nighter and Ultimate College Idol “playgrounds”. To get started and create your own avatar you’ll first need to head over to theultimatesteal.com/Sweepstakes and register. Once [...]

2007 Search Blogs Awards : Nominations Now Open
Good morning readers! It’s late December again and the search conferences have come to a finish, which means like in 2005 and 2006, Search Engine Journal will be hosting and holding our annual Search Blogs Awards. Our last two years of Search Blogs Awards were a grand success, with corporate, industry and private bloggers [...]

Is Google Building a Social Network Around Its Portal?
A lot can be deduced about the recent developments in Google’s online empire that past couple of months. New product launches, new features of current web properties, a social movement among other things which could lead to a probable conclusion that Google maybe developing itself to be the ultimate social networks of all social networks. It [...]

Netease Searches With Yodao
Netease, the company that operates popular portal 163.com and is big in offering online games has re-launched their search engine Yodao with some new features like news search.

Paid Reviews Examples by Matt Cutts and Paid Links
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 [...]

Google Knol�edge�, Wikipedia and Trias Politica
Arnold Zafra posted about Google’s KNOL service (derived from the word “knowledgeâ€�) 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.

11 Steps to Successful SEO for Your Business
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 [...]

MS AdCenter Affiliate Program Launch and Some Historic Affiliate Marketing Insights
Despite the not so perfect reputation that affiliate marketing has are companies like Microsoft and even Google using this advertising and marketing channel with thousands of other retailers around the world to promote their products and services on the Internet. Linda at 5 Star Affiliate Programs just released the news about Microsoft’s new adCenter Affiliate Program. [...]

Google Rolls Out Centralized Profiles Via New Google Profiles
Over the weekend, Google quietly began rolling out a new, centralized profile system that will supply personalized information to each of the Google products that you use. Google Profile will subsequently share this information across all of Google’s products, bringing together various Google systems that besides a common log-in, haven’t previously played nice and shared [...]

Tamar Weinberg is a Schwag Addict!
It’s not the non-stop blogging that Search Engine Roundtable’s Tamar Weinberg pulls off during search marketing conferences. It’s not the fact that most of her coverage posts would pass almost any spellchecker. And it’s not the multiple blogging that Tamar does all across the tech, lifehacking and search engine pieces of the blogosphere that impresses me the [...]

The Upcoming Face-Off Between Microsoft vs. Google : Battle on the Horizon
The New York Times had an interesting piece in the paper over the weekend, which talked about an upcoming battle between Microsoft and Google. The two companies are already somewhat of bitter rivals, but the battle is about to heat up even more, if we are to believe the NY Times, who foresee an [...]

Will Google Finally Get the FTC Clearance to Buy DoubleClick
The Google-DoubleClick deal has been going for too long now, that it is already tiring to follow on how the development of the transactions has been going on. The deal has been on the Federal Trade Commission’s table for several months now that one wonders whether its going to push through or not. But suddenly [...]

The $500 Million Microsoft-Viacom Deal
The press release lead says: Companies sign landmark multiyear deal to collaborate on content distribution, advertising, event promotions and gaming; Microsoft’s Atlas to become exclusive ad serving platform for Viacom U.S. Web sites. How much was the deal worth? A project base value of approximately $500 million in financial considerations and business services between the two companies. [...]

Digg.com for Sale : $300 Million
Digg.com is officially in the market for sale with a price tag of $300 million dollars. One of the most popular social media sites on the net with millions of visitors per month and one of the largest user-generated content sites around, Digg has one of the lmost loyal user followings on the net. Venture Beat [...]

FCC Approves Google’s Application to Bid on Wireless Spectrum
Google’s application to bid in the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction next month has been accepted by the Federal Communications Comission (FCC). However, some of Google’s biggest rivals in the auction, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, were placed on the “incomplete” list and will be required to re-submit their applications in order to be [...]

Buried Link Treasure: The Acquisition of Quality Backlinks
As we all know, link building has become a bit more difficult these days. Google has recently come out with a new campaign to filter out paid links, or links that are purchased solely for the purposes of gaining additional link popularity. This has been going on for several years, but lately they have [...]

Natural Language Search Not a Priority for Google
Some segments of the search engine world, such as Ask and Powerset, are gambling on the idea that the future of search is in natural language search, which essentially allows people to conduct searches using actual, useful sentences instead of possibly vague keywords. So what does one of the world’s most popular search engines [...]

Yahoo Inks Deal with Latin America’s Top Mobile Operator, America Movil
Not to be outdone with the recent news buzz about rivals Microsoft and Google, Yahoo does it end-of-the-year bang with its share of the web limelight. For its part, Yahoo announced that it has inked a deal with Latin American mobile operator America Movil bringing with it is around 143 million subscribers who will all [...]

Kayak.com Travel Search Engine Merges With SideStep Inc.
Kayak.com announced today the completion of a $196 financing round, which they will use to complete a merger with SideStep Inc. and to pursue a more aggressive global expansion. With the merger of Kayak.com and SideStep.com, ‘the world’s first travel search site’, they will have created the world’s 5th largest travel brand. Both Kayak and [...]

Google Granted DoubleClick Acquisition, Big Week for Big Media
In a pro-Big Media trend by government regulatory agencies, Google was just handed a huge Christmas present by the FTC, which voted 4 to 1 to approve the $3 Billion Google acquisition of DoubleClick. The FTC determined that there is enough competition in the online advertising space to let Google control a very large chunk [...]

Meta Search Engines : Why Use Them? Still Important?
Engines which work on top of search engines has been a growing area ever since Web Search went mainstream. Most meta-search engines use content from the top engines - Google, Yahoo or Live Search and many also refer to content specific sources such as Flickr, PicSearch for image search. Infact, DogPile was one of the [...]

Google Won’t Just Step Down the Search Rankings, Tops comScore’s November Report
Looks like Google is out to dominate the search engine battle this year. It has consistently topped search engine rankings from various web analytics reports for the past couple of months, and in what seems to be the final ranking for this year, it once again shown the search engine industry its supremacy in terms [...]

WikiaSearch Launches in Private Beta
Michael Arrington  is reporting that WikiaSearch, Jimmy Wales’ much anticipated open-source search engine has actually launched, today. The closed announcement (mailed through the WikiaSearch  mailing list) stated that selected people will be allowed to get into Wikia in the next couple of days before it hits for public consumption in January 2008. Wikia is the brain [...]

Frequent Flyer Miles from Google Checkout
It’s not as good of a deal as the Healthy Choice pudding frequent flyer miles of 1999, but Google is serving up some of its own punch drunk loving with Double Frequent Flyer Miles on Alaska Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Midwest Airlines, Northwest Airlines, United Airlines, and US Airways for each dollar Google [...]

Empire Today : How to Optimize a Badly Branded Google Results Page
Last week was a trying week for me as on top of the normal day to day responsibilities of managing a search blog and a search marketing company, I was also managing multiple projects which were a bit out of my field of expertise. We decided to renovate my condo just in time for the holidays [...]

BookMach : Bookmarks &Sites That Find You
Bookmarking has become more personalized thanks to the likes of Social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon. Bookmach is another search engine that provides a personalized approach to bookmarking content. From the outset, BookMach is an engine that indexes several thousands of blogs, e-zines and as they call it, highly reputed sites. A user can [...]

Sam’s Club Search Marketing : Good or Bad for the Industry?
Sam’s Club, the Wal-Mart owned mega store which is a godsend to small businesses looking to stock locally breaking dependency on wholesale distributors, is now offering a search marketing service targeted towards those same small businesses. Sam’s Club’s LeadConnect, which seems to be a resold version of Innuity LeadConnect, offers McMarketing for the small business which [...]

Google’s AutoLink Browser Tool in Court on Patent Infringement Charges
The U.S. Court of Appealrs ruled on Wednesday that Google’s AdSense program did not infringe on any patents as alleged by Hyperphrase Technologies. However the court overturned part of a lower court decision, landing Google’s AutoLink browser tool back in court. Hyperphrase Technologies initially filed a lawsuit against Google in April 2006, making claims that [...]

Google Bans AdWords Ads for Being Too Sexy
Google has blocked the serving of AdWords contextual (or AdSense) display ads in the European market of US lingerie company Pampered Passions because the company has deemed the ads as having adult content. The Pampered Passions campaign invites men to buy lingerie for their loved ones for Christmas, but the tone and skin shown in the [...]

Like.com : Revisiting Visual Search as It Should Be
Riya launched Like.com, a visual search engine in the year 2006. Image search in its true spirit should be about the image only. Most image search engines today rely on additional tags and meta data to refine their image searches. Its more like feeling for a color with your eyes closed. Riya, having accomplished at Facial [...]

Vote for the Search Blogs Awards of 2007
The nominations for the Search Blogs Awards of 2007 have been compiled and we’re ready to have you vote for your favorite Search Blogs, Communities and other search related categories for 2007. This year, we have 19 voting categories and had to condense a few due to the new blogs and themes which have become common [...]

Otavo : The Intention Search Engine
Launched about a year and a half ago, Otavo is famous as the intention engine. Headquartered at Canada, the engine is loosely coupled around search results and result seekers. Founder Amanuel Tewold named it after “Organizing Text, Audio and Video” which is what Otavo seeks to do of course, but with a social twist. The basic [...]

Google Adds U.S. Elections Coverage on News Portal
Doug Caverly of WebProNews is reporting that Google News has added coverage of the U.S. 2008 elections. The Official Google News Blog has announcement about this new feature last week. To provide direct access to extensive coverage of the candidates, the campaigns, and the issues, Google News has launched a new Elections section on our [...]

Google Reader Sharing Feature Raises Privacy Concerns
Google announced a small change to Google Reader back on December 14 which seemed innocent enough, and in line with their goals of making all the world’s content searchable. Nevertheless, users of the service have been none too pleased with the change, citing serious privacy concerns and raising hell over the holidays. The update to [...]

Google Partners with DoCoMo : Japanese Search Market Prepares for iPhone
Google is making a push to expand its reach in the Yahoo owned Japanese market via targeting where the majority of Japanese users spend their time online, their cell phones. Google has partnered with NTT DoCoMo, a major cell phone carrier in Japan to power their default search on all phones, bringing Google power to [...]

Introducing SearchSalad: A Healthy Way to Search
Every once in awhile its good to see other metasearch engine come out of the web. While the top five major search engines battle it out, day in and day out in outclassing each other introducing new features here and there, answering privacy concerns of users, its a breather that something like SearchSalad came out [...]

How Has Google AdSense Changed Your Life?
One of my long time blogging friends, Amit Agarwal, produced this video on how Google AdSense helped him become the first independent blogger in India, after the advertising system gave him the chance to move back home and become his own boss. The video was selected by Google to become featured on the Google AdSense blog. Google [...]

Google Knol - Looking at Wikipedia’s Rival
There’s a new kid on the online block named Knol and even this early in the development stage, some people are already predicting that it could bring about yet another significant change to the way we share information on the Internet. Knol is a new Web service being developed by Google that is meant to [...]

Google Services Bugs and Usability Issues That Spoil My Holiday Spirit – Part II
This is the second part of my series about bugs and usability issues with various Google services. My previous post was about Google Picasa and Google Checkout and also included some general comments to Google Storage, which is a paid service provided by Google to increase the amount of data you can have in your [...]

Google Services Bugs and Usability Issues That Spoil My Holiday Spirit – Part I
It’s the end of the year and I have a little gift for Google for the year 2008. It’s a summary of issues and bugs I found in the various Google services, free and paid ones as well. Some are fresh and triggered this post and some others are older where I already send a [...]

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