Microsoft has gone on the full offensive in their attack to purchase Yahoo!.  According to a recent press release this made Yahoo! shares jump 17.96% making me very happy since I own Yahoo stock. Yahoo!’s current market cap is $44.41 billion, wait it just went up to $44.60 billion. Some think Yahoo! will sell at over $50 billion.

This would be good for Internet users if the culture of Microsoft does not overwhelm Yahoo!’s. I think that Yahoo is a better company than Google and has a much wider range of services. Statistics show that users spend much more time on a Yahoo! site than on Google.

Yahoo! has announced that it is purchasing the remaining equity in one of the largest emerging online advertising exchanges Right Media for $680 million. Yahoo! first became involved with Right Media when it purchased 20% of the company in October 2006.

With the two largest search engines buying online ad agencies a number of conflict issues are raised by these purchases. If a client uses Right Media will they be advised to use Google for additional advertising or just Yahoo? This does open up a number of opportunities for the advertisers.

While getting the pages of a site remains relatively easy, removing indexed pages from search has remained a tougher task. There is a post at Googleblogs  which explains how to do exactly that. There are helpful instructions on how to remove individual URLs, a directory, entire site and cached copies too. For example, you can remove your entire site as follows:

The basic system remains the same despite these enhancements. The enhancements are:

    *  Assessing the content of the ad and landing page in relation to the user’s likely intent.
    * Assessing the keywords that an advertiser selects in relation to the advertiser’s landing page content, to confirm that they are substantially relevant to
       both the landing page and the user’s search query.
    * Trying to ensure that there is substantive content on the landing page to fulfill the user’s query.
    * Assessing the duplicative nature of content in overall search results. In cases where there may be content that is duplicated within search results (including landing pages) Microsoft reserves the right to limit advertising of the duplicate content when it lessens the user experience.

Google has entered into an agreement with Clear Channel to sell 30 second ads on a network of 675 stations owned by the latter. What seems to be win-win agreement for both, Google gains national coverage for its advertisers. It can also target specific audiences with time and geographic accuracy. For Clear Channel, this means an extra source of revenue. 

According to John Hogan, chief executive officer, Clear Channel Radio, “This is a true win-win. Clear Channel Radio gets access to an entirely new group of advertisers within a new and complementary sales channel, and Google adds another option for its existing customers.”

Matt Cutts had a recent three-part post that has been subject of much controversy. At the center of this controversy lies Matt Cutt’s appeal to report webmsters involved in buying links as spammers.

The series of posts began with this,(http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/ ) in which he equated paid links to hidden links, both seen as unethical acts to boost page rank. In this second post(http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/by-the-way-2/ ), he targeted sponsored themes which became acts suspicious motive too. In the last post (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ ), he asked webmasters to report paid links in the authenticated spam report form at Google’s webmaster console. Information regarding the following were to be  provided in the report:

Continued from:

Search Optimization Marketing Best Practices | SEARCH OPTIMIZATION MARKETING BEST PRACTICES FOR WEBSITES

Search Optimization Marketing

Search optimization marketing with SEO is now easier as Google adds a new way to communicate to Google about their site map. Now just specify a line that is the site map in the robots.txt file and all search engines will be able to locate it. Vanessa Fox with Google still suggests that the site map is submitted to Google to help identify any errors that it might contain.

DoubleClick has been purchased for $3.1 billion by Google causing a lot of discussion in the forums on what this all means. I remember when DoubleClick was originally an ad agency that embraced the Internet. It is great to see them get so richly rewarded over agencies that refused to adapt. This is a great purchase for Google if they handle the transition properly, with stock values so high Google is smart to broaden their business by adding supporting companies that are relevant to their core strengths.

Keyword Selection for: Search Engine Optimization | Search Optimization Marketing | Pay Per Click

“Long Tail” is the distribution of highly searched terms followed by a long “tail” of less frequently searched terms. While each term in the tail may not be searched in significant numbers the total of the numbers can be worth targeting as a group.

 I believe that in search optimization marketing using a large number of targeted terms has the overall cumulative value of a few high volume search terms with much less competition to get well placed.