IndustryDaily SearchCast, July 5, 2006: Google’s Ranking Criteria Categories Exposed?; Lawsuit Over Rankings Might Go Ahead; Google’s Not-So-Killer Products; Windows Live Local Click-To-Call & More!

Daily SearchCast, July 5, 2006: Google's Ranking Criteria Categories Exposed?; Lawsuit Over Rankings Might Go Ahead; Google's Not-So-Killer Products; Windows Live Local Click-To-Call & More!

Today’s search podcast covers Google’s categories of ranking criteria
accidentally exposed?; SEO tools to try; is Google a flop unless all of its
products are winners?; Windows Live Local gets click-to-call and more!

Tune-in by listening to this
MP3
file
, listening via WebmasterRadio
at 11:30am Eastern and repeated at 2pm Eastern Tuesday through Friday, via our
Odeo channel or through
iTunes via this

link
(or use alternative iTunes instructions explained
here) or
though our Yahoo Podcasts

channel
. Need more help tuning in live or finding the chat room? See the
Daily
SearchCast FAQ
.

Below are links to items discussed:

  • Hamburg, The Ukraine
    Football Team & Seeing The World Cup
  • Hamburg Fan Fest &
    Germany V. Argentina
  • Google’s
    Spam Score Details Shown?

    Peter Da Vanzo spotted a DigitalPoint thread that found clues as to how Google
    scores spam results behind the scenes. Now, honestly, I have no idea if this
    is about spam or something else, it is just that the information posted in the
    forum, seems to appear like a spam score report by Google. How did it come
    about? The user was presented with this information after clicking on a cache
    URL in the Google results. The user was shocked to see the following
    information revealed to him….
  • Report a
    Content Violation

  • KinderStart.com Case May Proceed To Court?

    News.com reports that the KinderStart.com case may proceed to court, based on
    this past Friday’s hearing. Kinderstart.com initially sued Google for a site
    penalty that downgraded the site’s rankings in the Google search results.
    Kinderstart.com claims Google violated antitrust laws, "What Google is trying
    to do is take out the competition," Kinderstart.com’s lawyer said. The judge
    gave KinderStart.com’s lawyers until September 29th to make revisions to the
    complaint. The judge said, "You can’t just file a blanket lawsuit and say, ‘We
    think we’re going to find some stuff.’" Also see news brief at ComputerWorld….
  • SEOMoz’s
    Keyword Difficulty Tool

    Rand posted an update to a tool named keyword difficulty tool. The tool’s name
    is pretty descriptive enough, it tells you how competitive a keyword is to
    rank for. There is great detail on how it works here and here….

  • Interactive Review Of SEOBook’s SEO Firefox Extension

    Aaron Wall over at SEO Book released a Firefox extension for SEOs. The Firefox
    extension can be viewed here, it allows you to see on the Google and Yahoo
    search result pages the PageRank, the age, the links, the .edu links the .gov
    links, the del.icio.us numbers and Technorati rank, the Alexa rank a cached
    link and much more, right on the page. I decided it would be fun to do an
    other video cast. You can view the video cast by reading more….
  • Google
    Warns U.S. Legislators On Anti-Trust Complaints Over Net Neutrality

    The Washington Post reports that Google has warned the United States, that if
    telecoms abuse net neutrality principles it backs, through a new law that
    might go through, it could consider an anti-trust action. If you want all the
    details, check out the Washington Post….
  • Yahoo China
    To Be Sued For Linking To Sites Selling Pirated Music

    Spotted via TechCrunch, Bloomberg reports that Yahoo China is to be sued for
    linking to sites that sell pirated music. The article claims "about 90 percent
    of all recordings in China are illegal, with sales of pirated music worth about
    $400 million annually," according to the International Federation for the
    Phonographic Industry. A new law in China that came into effect on July 1 "fines
    distributors of illegally copied music, movies and other material over the
    Internet as much as 100,000 yuan ($12,500)."…
  • Ending
    Click Fraud with Pay-Per-Percentage

    In Pay-Per-Percentage vs. PPC, Shimon Sandler points out an interesting new
    paper from the folks at Microsoft Research – Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions:
    An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud (pdf) As Shimon notes, the
    idea is that this type of advertising approach would be "immune to both click
    fraud and impression fraud," and would use something called "pre-fix match"
    instead of broad match….
  • Windows
    Live Local Integrates ‘Call For Free’ Into All Business Listings

    The intrepid Gary Price called my attention to the quiet integration of "click
    to call" functionality into Windows Live Local over the weekend. I couldn’t
    determine whether this was homegrown or whether Microsoft was working with a
    partner such as eStara or Ingenio to offer the service….

  • Microsoft Running Out Of Room In Redmond

    A New York Times article looks into how Microsoft is running out of room in
    Redmond. The company is adding 12,000 new employees, which requires them to
    expand the headquarters 3.1 million square feet, more than a third of its
    current size. They will be adding fourteen new buildings and leases to fit all
    these new employees. The problem is, there is not enough room for them to
    expand at this pace….
  • New York
    Times Looks At Google’s Hardware & Infrastructure

    A New York Times article has a detailed analysis of Google’s infrastructure
    and discussion with Urs Hölzle, senior vice president for operations at
    Google. Here are some of the key points I pulled from that article. + Google
    tends builds from ground up versus buying. + Google’s computing costs are half
    those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional
    corporate technology users. + Critics call Google’s philosophy "unnecessary
    and inefficient." + "Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by
    shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software ? individual
    hardware components can fail, but software…
  • Google’s
    Non Search Products A Flop

    BusinessWeek reports that when Google launches a new non-search product, the
    competition "shivers," Google has yet to lead in market share for any of those
    non-search products. Google’s Gtalk is currently ranked number ten with two
    percent market share, Google Finance is the "40th-most-visited finance site,"
    and Gmail "is the system of choice for only about one-quarter the number of
    people who use MSN and Yahoo e-mail." So with all these product launches, is
    Google a threat? Read more at BusinessWeek….
  • Google
    To Launch Book Search Service In China

    The People’s Daily Online reports that Google will be launching an on-line
    book search service in China. Google signed agreements with publishing houses,
    instead of libraries (as Baidu has), including publishers named Tsinghua
    University Press and the Children’s Publishing House. Google said that the
    books would be available on-line, "provide search links and grant free access
    to a segment of each work, but readers would have to pay to read the full
    content." Google plans on taking a 30 percent commission from the profit on
    selling books online….
  • Yahoo
    Launches New Home Page Design In UK & Ireland

    Personal Computer World in the UK reports that Yahoo has finally released out
    of beta, the new home page redesign that has been in beta since mid-February.
    The new design, is visible for all at http://uk.yahoo.com/ and is described
    "as the biggest redesign in its history, and promised that the new homepages
    would focus on search, content, community and personalisation." Danny confirms
    that his Yahoo home page has switched to the beta version, and he is based in
    the UK, of course. I am based in New York, and my Yahoo home page has remained
    the same….

Resources

The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

whitepaper | Analytics The 2023 B2B Superpowers Index

8m
Data Analytics in Marketing

whitepaper | Analytics Data Analytics in Marketing

10m
The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

whitepaper | Digital Marketing The Third-Party Data Deprecation Playbook

1y
Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

whitepaper | Digital Marketing Utilizing Email To Stop Fraud-eCommerce Client Fraud Case Study

1y