SEOTall SEO Tall

If the series of tests that Google engineers are doing on their search portal is any indication of what may soon become of the Google Search, then we might be looking at Social-powered Google search engine in the near future.

For several months now, some selected Adsense publishers have been beta testing Google’s hosted ad serving manager which as we said before is a good tool for letting Adsense in to your site’s unsold ad spots.

BOTW Local Directory, which Eric reviewed on SEJ, is offering a savings of 50% off the Premium Business details page, so instead of their price of $9.95 per month, advertisers can pay only $5 per month.

There are only 5 days left in the August promotion, so if you haven’t taken advantage of the offer, check out http://local.botw.org/premium.

Google is officially rolling its Search Suggest feature which has been in Google labs for quite some time now. Google Search Suggest works similarly with the “Did you mean” feature that we often get when we enter a seemingly odd/misspelled search term which the Google engine finds incorrect. Only this time, the suggestion is done real-time. (more…)

I really do not do many speaking engagements on SEO and search marketing, but plan to in the immediate future (the next speaking and moderator sessions are planned for the ScarySEO mini-Con in Florida). Back in June I did have the chance to speak on behalf of TrafficBlend, my SEO and online marketing consulting firm, at the South Florida MeetUp on Link Building which was hosted by AgencyWeb.

As you may already know or heard, the interest in mobile is one of the hottest topics for online marketers. Technology from the iPhone, Blackberry and other phones are making it a lot easier for users to browse the web through their phones. According to Opera, State of the Mobile Web, mobile use increased by 16% in June over past months and that number will continue to increase.

As expected Google once again is dominating the July search share data from comScore. Google got 61.9% of the total core search rankings for July followed by Yahoo with 20.5%, Microsoft with 8.9%, Ask Network with 4.5% and AOL 4.2%.

Among the webmaster tools available for us to tweak our sites settings for SEO purposes, Yahoo’s Site Explorer is the most underated. It is not as popular as Google’s Webmaster Tools and as not as noisy as Live Search Webmaster Center lately. Until now, as Yahoo is rolling out a new interface for its Site Explorer tool. Apparently this new look is in preparation for bigger things to come for this Yahoo webmasters’ tool.

There’s a couple of interesting things to note in the July search share ranking released by Nielsen-Online. But first, yes as expected Google once again leads the pack garnering around 4.8 billion searches of the total 8 billion searches conducted for July in the U.S. What so interesting about this figure is the fact that Google has registered a 16% year-to-year growth. Even more interesting is the fact that Google’s YOY is even bigger than the total YOY growth of the overall searches.

Google Webmaster Central has added a new feature that aims to make website visitors’  encounter with the perennial problem and most dreaded 404 “Not found” page a more pleasant if not useful experience. Although there has been manual work-around to solve this problem, mostly by editing the 404 php pages and customizing it to direct users to other parts of a site, it has been a tedious process, until now.

Latest report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index published by the University of Michigan shows Google topping the list of search and portal companies customer satisfaction survey. Based on interviews conducted on 3,000 customers, Google got 87% customer satisfaction rating for 2008.

Finally six months after its launch, Yahoo! Buzz is now open to the public. The announcement follows several months of beta testing the service to selected sites, including the SE Journal. Yahoo claims that Buzz now has around 5 million users and sites which were selected to implement the content voting system has indicated increase in traffic since they embed the Buzz button on their site. (more…)

We’ve seen and heard Google advocates for the freeing up of the white spectrum. And today it has officially launched its campaign to unite the public in lobbying for the opening up of this unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels to according to Google to provide affordable, high-speed wireless Internet connectivity nationwide. Google is calling for uncharged use of this spectrum not only for their benefit for the whole public as well.

The list of companies suing up Google just got a new member in GraphOn Corp., a  developer of server-based application publishing and web-enabling software solutions. GraphOn has charged Google with infringement of four its owned patents.

Some blog sites are reporting that Google has added the Adsense for feeds option in their Adsense accounts’ Setup menu. Checking out my Adsense account validated these reports. Right after the Adsense for Content and Adsense for Search options in the Adsense Setup menu is a new option labeled “Adsense for Feeds”. Google says it allows users to place relevant ads in feeds Google manages for them.