Selling The Benefits Of SEO In A Large Enterprise

This is the first of a two part series on selling seo in a large enterprise. Part 2 will be published as my next Industrial Strength column. In Part 1, the focus will be on why getting search traffic is important to an organization. Part 2 will explore some of the consequences [...]

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Search Month European Edition, October 2009

In Search Month European Edition we bring you a monthly update of European search news, with related links to full coverage. Here’s what happened in October.
Yandex and Google dominate in Russia. Numbers show the Russian search market is dominated by Yandex and Google. Both giants account for 96% of all search traffic in Russia in [...]

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10 Last-Minute SEO Tips For Holiday Shopping Season

The holiday shopping season is coming up fast. Don’t worry, there’s still time to do some quick-turnaround seo that can have an impact on your natural search traffic (and resulting revenue!) in time for Black Friday and CyberMonday.
For many online retailers, November and December are the busiest months of the year. Of course, this is [...]

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How To Avoid Getting Your Search Rankings Trashed By Malware

As if seos don’t have enough things to worry about already, add malware to the list. Why does malware matter to seos? If the site you are working on gets infected, its search traffic will plummet. Search engines attempt to remove infected pages from their search results, or they label them with an ominous warning, [...]

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Bing Continues With Fake Referrers: What Part Of Stop Don’t They Understand?

For over two years now, Microsoft’s search engine has been generating fake information that can make site owners think they’re getting strange search traffic (including porn traffic), when they are not. It’s time for this to come to an end.
The culprit? Microsoft’s “crawler,” the software that visits web pages across the web that go into [...]

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The One in Which I Ponder the Chances of Success for Microsoft & Yahoo

Now that we’ve all had time to digest Microsoft’s 10-year deal with Yahoo, it’s time to ask ourselves if this partnership will live up to the hype?

It seems like we’ve been talking about this deal every other day for the past year or more. In fact, digging through the Marketing Pilgrim archives–and ending up 30 pages deep in “Microsoft/Yahoo” rumors–I discovered it was back in September of 2007 that the idea first germinated:

…Under the scenario discussed by top executives, Yahoo would have outsourced that search-advertising activity — which places small text ads next to Web search results — to either Google or Microsoft Corp…

At the time, Yahoo’s then CEO Jerry Yang said there were “no sacred cows” for the company. Then promptly dismissed any notion that the company would give up operating its own search engine.

My, how things have changed.

Now–with the drama behind us and the deal announced–we need to consider if this act of collusion will end up presenting a serious challenge to Google’s dominance. While Microsoft’s Bing.com continues to inch forward with market share, will the general search public flock to the Google alternative–or will it send us deeper into the warm embrace of the search engine we’ve loved for the past decade?

I could see how we might ultimately come to like Bing. It’s got a catchy name, some cool TV ads running, and could provide those that love to live outside the mainstream, a flashy new search engine to evangelize. But, does a partnership with Yahoo actually dilute Bing’s chances of success? I’m not talking about success as measured by an increase in market share–by that measure, the deal is already a winner. I’m talking about real success. The kind of success that doesn’t just come from cannibalizing Yahoo’s existing search traffic, but from honest-to-goodness market share stolen from Google.

That’s where I simply don’t see much chance of a happy ending. I’ve worked for a company that decided it wanted to increase market share by means of acquisitions. Sure, you get to show growth on paper, but that’s not growth that’s sustainable. It pleases the shareholders, but neither the heart or mind are satisfied. Want further proof that buying market share is not sustainable? Take a look at the stagnation going on over at IAC’s Ask.com.

The biggest obstacle now facing Microsoft’s Bing is this: do we consider it a weaker offering, because it had to partner with Yahoo? Or, does the partnership increase its chances of success?

Perhaps the only glimmer of hope for Microsoft is that Yahoo has played this role in a previous life. Remember when all of your searches at Yahoo were powered by Google? Back then, Google was still building its own audience, and the exposure provided by Yahoo was, obviously, valuable to the company. Can Yahoo do the same for Bing?

There are many questions that I’m leaving unanswered. This post is merely a means for me to share my own thoughts on the deal–not to tell you how you should feel about it. Feel free to chime in with your own opinion on the chances of Microsoft and Yahoo truly challenging Google. I look forward to reading them!

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Pre Bing Sting With a Post Bing Bang?

While not the longest timeframe to be measuring in and considering all the Bing buzz surrounding its launch, Microsoft has got to feel that at least they are keeping everyone else out of the news with Bing having some early success.

In a case of “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news” if you are Microsoft the bad news of search traffic pre-Bing in May ’09, well, pretty much sucked. PCWorld Canada reports that Nielsen’s search engine report for the month revealed a bitter pill for any search engine to swallow

Microsoft’s Live/MSN search engine was the only one among the top five that saw its search usage shrink last month compared with May 2008.

Nothing worse than search engine usage shrinkage (once again for you Seinfeld fans, shrinkage does occur). What makes this number worse is the fact that overall search queries grew by just over 20% for the time period.

But like a super hero it was “Never fear, Bing is here!” at the end of May just in time for the summer months. The results to this point? Pretty good for Bing according to comScore.

“It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”

Over at SearchEngineLand, Danny Sullivan goes a little further and sees that the celebration may be research specific. Amongst the charts and graphs of various research results is the data from Compete and

Compete’s figures show that the launch has created no gain in search share.

So who has the real deal? Which information is correct? Does it matter at this point in the race? It’s likely that this data will be fodder for everyone to predict the demise of Google or the revealing of a chink in the armor of the search monster. Truth is that it’s just ‘fun facts’ for now. Only a long term pattern of increased market share for Bing will tell whether the introduction of the decision engine was a seminal moment in search or just another blip on the radar of the good ship Google.

Want more marketing news & views? Follow Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal on Twitter!

Using Predictive Modeling In Seasonal Search Campaigns

Optimal bidding for performance is a complex task for search marketers. When placing bids every day, you must be mindful of the volatility in the marketplace due to changing search traffic, competition, matching algorithms that vary across search engines and the changing needs of your business. For many of you, particularly if you work in [...]

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