Recently, there has been a lot of interesting news and announcements in Search Marketing involving all three major search engines. Here is a brief list of the latest happenings that you should definitely want to check out.
1). Google quietly removed PageRank from Webmaster Tools leaving it only on the Toolbar. Time will only tell if and when PageRank will totally disappear. Google rationale for removing PageRank is that site owners should not solely focus on this being the most important metric for them to track.
2). This week, Google plans to roll out a new tool for advertisers to measure the success or ROI of their display buys. The tool is called Campaign Insights and will only be available to those advertisers running campaigns on the Google Content Network. The tool crunches data from thousands of users to calculate how many searches a campaign caused post-viewing, as well as how many visits to the marketer’s Web site. It then compares this with a control set of users not exposed to the display ads.
3). Early this month, Google added “Quick View” links to more than 50% of the PDFs in their search index. In the past, the only way to view these documents was to download the file and open in a separate application. Now with “Quick View” users can view these files in HTML right in their web browser. The only downside is that some formatting from the original PDF is lost.
4). Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg confirmed that UI tweaks were done for the results pages where the maximum width was changed, decreasing the spacing between search results and the right hand side ads on wide screen. The change proved to help increase the click-through rate on the right hand side ads.
5). Google is testing a new feature on YouTube that enables you to search for comments being posted on YouTube in real-time. This could be a very valuable monitoring tool.
Yahoo
1). Yahoo Search announced that it was discontinuing their paid inclusion program Search Submit Pro effective December 31, 2009. The ramifications of this decision will definitely have tremendous implications in the world of search as many websites out there rely on Yahoo Search Submit Pro as a source of traffic, revenue generation and brand awareness and exposure.
2). Yahoo modified its Sponsored Search system to serve ads to iPhones and Android mobile phones giving Advertisers additional exposure and wider reach and relevancy.
3). Senior Director of Search at Yahoo mistakenly announced at SMX East that Yahoo Search no longer acknowledges the use of Meta Keywords tag. This is not true as Yahoo is still using the Meta Keyword tag and only thing that changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithm is that the ranking importance to Meta Keyword tags receives the lowest ranking priority in their system. Priority will be on words that appear in any other part of documents, including body, title, description, anchor text and other content.
Microsoft (Bing)
1). Microsoft announced that they are working to improve adCenter by updating the service with new features later this fall. Updates include improved functionalities regarding reporting and adCenter Desktop. Stay tuned for the adCenter Fall 2009 Release.
2). Microsoft acknowledges the value of the social web and is trying various methods to get users to search on Bing. Microsoft recently introduced a feature called “Bing and Ping”, which is in limited beta, which allows sharing of Bing search queries with other users.
What do you think of these announcements? We would like to hear from you. Please comment below.
Ankush Agarwal
Senior Search Marketing Analyst
MarketNet, Inc.
