Blog SEO Tip: Hop On A Media Feeding Frenzy
For bloggers wishing to improve their traffic, hopping onto a media feeding frenzy can give a nice burst in traffic which can translate into increases in longterm traffic.
A media feeding frenzy is when a subject or thing that’s happened suddenly becomes a top headliner story for journalists. News organizations have a well-developed radar for which stories of the day are going to be the most interesting for their audience, and they avidly push to provide articles quickly to satisfy the public’s sudden thirst. As more journalists glom onto the subject, it suddenly seems that everyone is reporting on some variation of the same subject, and this is a media feeding frenzy.
Bloggers can hop onto these feeding frenzies, and ride the wave of traffic associated with them. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/04/2008
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, News, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Tricks Blog Optimization, blog promotion, blog search engine optimization, blog seo
Mahalo Traffic Growth Vulnerable To Google Penalty
A couple of weeks ago, Heather Hopkins at Hitwise noted that the human-powered Mahalo search engine has been showing a very strong curve of increasing traffic:
They also noted that 76% of this traffic comes in as referrals from other search engines.
This is slightly ironic, since Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, has historically been very critical of the worth of search engine optimization. I’m not the only one who sees the irony in this, since Allen Stern also noted it, saying “Mahalo is an SEO Play“. As Allen notes, if Mahalo didn’t want this traffic it would be easy for them to block the spiders thru their robots.txt file. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/24/2008
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Filed under: Google, News, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Google, Jason Calacanis, Mahalo, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERPs
The Kelsey Group Puts Print Yellow Pages On Notice
Over at Media Post, The Kelsey Group is quoted today saying that the erosion in usage of print yellow pages is likely to fall off at a higher rate this year — by 10% this year, compared with only 2% to 3% erosion in recent years.
They state that a combination of factors such as more users going to internet yellow pages and local search engines combined with a recession are propelling the rapid erosion. Concerningly, one can extrapolate that if print YP usage is dropping, advertiser dollars might also follow the herd.
As Greg Sterling points out, The Kelsey Group has historically been a very staunch defender of the print YP industry, so this article is a bit of a gut-punch to people in the legacy print business, even though anyone watching the trends over the last few years won’t find it all that surprising.
One thing the Media Post article doesn’t mention is how (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/11/2008
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Filed under: Local Search, Market Data, News, Yellow Pages iyp, Kelsey Group, Local Search, Online-Yellow-Pages, print-yellow-pages, Yellow Pages
ReachLocal Becomes Authorized Google Adwords Reseller
ReachLocal announced today that they’ve formed a strategic alliance with Google to become an authorized Adwords reseller. Kevin Heisler at SEW reports that this will give them a leg up on competitors in local search who won’t benefit from the same status in the Google ecosystem.
ReachLocal also sells local ads into Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, AOL, and my old company, Superpages.com.
I was privileged to be given a tour of the ReachLocal offices here in Dallas back in September, (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/08/2008
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Monetization of Search, News, Yellow Pages Adwords, Google, Google Adwords, Local Search, online-advertising, reachlocal
More on ISPs & Behavioral Ad Targeting
ClickZ has another good article on ISPs and Behavioral Ad Targeting today. Not only do they mention NebuAd which I wrote about in December, but they also list a few other companies that use similar NOC hardware for the same sorts of behavioral targeting, including: Phorm, FrontPorch, and Project Rialto.
My private individual half doesn’t like this sort of targeting. I pay for internet access, and I don’t particularly want people using my data to pigeon-hole me into a demographic for specific types of ads — and I’m mistrustful of how private/secure/anonymous these companies will keep my individual usage data.
My more public, professional half has to readily admit that for advertisers, behavioural targeting may be very advantageous in terms of communicating to a desired audience of buyers, and could also be very cost-effective in reducing wasteful ad impressions. I suspect that behavioral ad targeting may convert at a higher rate than other media if executed in a sophisticated manner. The only downside is that it likely also restricts the size of the audience share available to be exposed to the ads.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 01/03/2008
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Filed under: Advertising, Marketing, News behavioral targeting, internet ads, internet advertising, Nebu Ad, NebuAd, online ads, online-advertising
Recent Google Improvements Fail To Halt Massive Malware Attack
Various news sites are reporting that a malware attack was deployed in the last couple of days, apparently based entirely upon black hat SEO tactics.
Software security company Sunbelt blogged about how the attack was generated: a network of spambots apparently added links into blog comments and forums pointing to the bad sites over a period of months in some cases, enabling those sites to achieve fair rankings in search engine result pages for a great many potential keyword search combinations. The pages either contained iframes which attempted to load malware onto visitors machines or perhaps they began redirecting to the sites containing malware at some point after achieving rankings. Sunbelt provided interesting screenshots of the SERPs in Google:
And also showed some screenshots of some of the keyword-stuffed pages which apparently got indexed:
I think it’s not at all a coincidence (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/28/2007
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Filed under: General, Google, News, Tricks, Worst Practices black-hat-seo, blackhat-seo, Google, Malware, spam, Sunbelt
Superpages.com Adds More User-Generated Content to the Local Mix
About a week ago, Idearc announced that Superpages.com had introduced more user-content features.
Previously, the primary component of user content on the site was limited to user ratings and reviews associated with business listings.
Some of the new features this recent upgrade added include allowing all users to enhance basic biz profile information, uploading pictures of organizations, wiki-like biz listing “blog” features which could allow simplistic blogging by businesses and/or could be used as a consumer comment or Q/A zone for each business since any user could submit info to them.
Of all the top online yellow pages and local search sites, I believe that Superpages may now have the distinction of having the greatest (more…)
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 11/14/2007
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Filed under: Design, Local Search, Market Data, News, Online Directories, Social Media Optimization, Yellow Pages idearc, Internet-Yellow-Pages, iyp, Local Search, superpages, Yellow Pages
Verizon Hijacks Mistyped Domains
I was stunned today to read this report by Martin Bosworth at Consumeraffiars.com on how Verizon is delivering up custom search results pages to fiber-optic users when they misspell domain names. Since I started working from home here in the Dallas area this Spring, I’d upgraded to Verizon’s FiOS service, so this change would affect me directly. Indeed, after a moment’s worth of testing, I see that I am being sent to a Verizon search results page when I type in a domain name that doesn’t exist:
It’s not all that surprising that Verizon might do this, since they oppose net neutrality, but for users like myself, this is highly undesirable. I’ve been highly complimentary about Verizon’s FiOS service, because I’ve had excellent speed and high quality from it. I work from home providing expertise around internet technologies, so it’s vital that I be able to clearly experience the internet just as the majority of the rest of internet users out there, so having Verizon meddling with what’s delivered up to me is not cool.
If you all recall, another company did something quite similar to this back in 2003: Verisign previously did something quite similar when they abruptly launched their “Site Finder” service which (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/05/2007
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Filed under: Domain Names, Monetization of Search, News, technology, Worst Practices Domain Names, InfoSpace, net-neutrality, VeriSign, Verizon, Yahoo
Infospace to Merge with Marchex?
At least, that’s what this Forbes article theorizes as one possible explanation, quoting a Wall Street analyst:
“Scott Sutherland, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, said the most likely scenario is that the company will take InfoSpace private to save money or merge with the search and media company, Marchex, whose executives are former executives at InfoSpace.”
Just yesterday, I expressed a bit of confusion about why InfoSpace made deals to sell off their mobile services to Motricity, and sell off directory services to Idearc’s Superpages… (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/16/2007
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Filed under: Local Search, News InfoSpace, Local Search, Marchex, Mergers, metasearch-engines, Mobile Search
Is InfoSpace Cashing Out?
First it was announced that InfoSpace was selling Switchboard and other directory properties of theirs to Idearc for $225 million. Today InfoSpace announces that they’re selling off their mobile services business for $135 million.
InfoSpace’s release says that they’re selling off the mobile services “…to focus on online search”. They’re apparently going to also give a chunk of this change back to their shareholders in a dividend.
This just makes me wonder, is Infospace cashing out?
Local search has been one of Infospace’s strengths over time — they even changed their core website a few years ago to focus on local search & yellow pages more — prior to that they’d been a more general search engine (they still own general meta search engines like Dogpile.com).
Also, this mobile service sale seems odd since the rest of the internet marketing industry is starting to hyper-focus on mobile search and services.
Even though “yellow pages” directories are not exactly the same thing as local search, you’d expect for InfoSpace to hold onto the assets (and hold onto the mobile services), or to sell the assets to use the money to capitalize on the search areas where they want to focus. So, why are they doing this?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/15/2007
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Filed under: Local Search, Market Data, News InfoSpace, Local Search, Mobile Search
