This is an box for a short bio to be edited in the header.php file. Of course you can try to persuade people to Google Owns Performics (By Extension) »
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- Now that the DoubleClick / Google marriage has been blessed by both the European Commission and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, SEOs and SEMs everywhere will be eager to see what Google will do with Performics. Performics is a Search Engine Marketing company owned by DoubleClick and so Google now owns a Search Engine Marketing company by the fact that they own DoubleClick.
And to think that Google had the nerve to penalize US just for selling a few text-links on our blog … wow.
Here is a quote from Performics’ web site that I thought summed it all up pretty well:
Together, DoubleClick Performics and DoubleClick offer clients an unparalleled range of marketing solutions and are uniquely positioned to compare effectiveness across marketing channels for valued clients.
I particularly liked the phrase “uniquely positioned“. THAT is somewhat understating it, I think. Imagine being able to pick up the phone and call Google to find out what to do to get a particular site ranking #1… Why would ANYONE hire any other SEM/SEO firm? After all, if you wanted your brand new site to shoot to the top of the SERPs, wouldn’t you STRONGLY consider the Search Engine Marketing company owned by the number one Search Engine? Of course you would. At the very least, the fact that Performics and Google are related has to carry a ton of clout, even if Google claims that they are not going to give special treatment to Performics’ clients.
Danny Sullivan posted about this today in a post that would have taken me about 5 months to complete – good job, Danny.
Yahoo Improves Search Market Share in December »
With all that shopping going on in December, it should come as no surprise that Search Engine traffic was down slightly (-3.9%) across the board during the month. After all, who can find time to goof around on the Internet when they are too busy doing last minute shopping?
Despite that drop, Yahoo! search traffic was actually up. In fact, according to a comScore report, they were the big winner for the month with a 0.5% increase in use and, since they dipped 0.4% in November, that basically put them back where they were in October with a 22.9% overall market share. However, Google is still the big dog with 58.4% share of the Search market. That translates to more than 5.5 billion (yes, billion) searches per month using Google. That number does not include searches performed on YouTube and other Google owned properties, which tracked an additional 1.5 billion results in December alone.
As you can imagine, search traffic on shopping sites climbed quite a bit in December. For example, Amazon sites logged 215 million searches, which was a better than 20% increase over their numbers in November. eBay was up 3.9% and Craigslist was up 6.3%.
Social networking sites saw a decline in use in December. My guess would be the fact that people were actually networking the old fashioned way – fact-to-face at parties. That means they were not spending as much time searching on Facebook (-14.3%) and MySpace (-19.9%). Plus, in many cases, people are accessing those sites while they are at work and, since most workers are using up their vacation time before the end of the year, they were not logging in each day.
At any rate, the numbers should be back to normal starting this month, but Google is still going to be on top.
Check out our Flash graphic in the far right column for a visual 
.
Google: Do as I Say, Not as I Do »
When Google comes down on everyone else for not using “nofollow” on external links, one would think that they would make sure they they were in compliance themselves. However, there are some examples of Google’s failure to follow their own policy and, therefore, are themselves contributing to the pollution of the Google Index.
To rehash, here is what Matt Cutts said on how a webmaster should treat a paid link:
If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.
And here is why that disclosure is so important to Google
As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google.
So, now that we have a better idea of how strongly Google feels about paid links, how are they doing? When they link out to someone who has paid them or entered into a partnership with them, are they using “nofollow” on those links? Let’s check a few.
Michael Gray has a great post that illustrates Google’s failure to follow their own policy about using “nofollow” on external links.
Golfballs.com gets a sweet PR6 backlink after using Google Product Search:
If you check out that article on Google’s blog, you will even see that further down the page, Golfballs.com gets a super-sweet deep backlink from Google for the keyphrase “Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls”. If you view source on that page, notice – no “nofollow”.
Here is another one:
Google press release gives Motorola a nice little backlink
Again, view source on that page – no “nofollow” applied to that link either.
Now, if one webmaster A entered into some type of financial partnership with webmaster B and, during an announcement of that partnership, webmaster A placed a backlink to webmaster B, webmaster A would be required to use “nofollow” on that link or run the risk of having PR removed. I filled out a “paid links report” on these pages, so maybe they will have their PR stripped along with the rest of us who did not use “nofollow” correctly.
Of course, I am sure that this is just an oversight. As Michael points out, Google intends on fixing it and this is certainly a relatively small issue. But why would they not make sure they are in compliance with their own policy before implementing a sweeping change that negatively impacted so many sites?
Kudos to Michael for finding these and he has several more examples listed on his blog.
Wikia Search Alpha Launched »
Jimmy Wales announced the Alpha release of Wikia Search, which many have been waiting for for about a year since he first announced the project. I jumped over there to the alpha site to check it out and was registered in just a few minutes. Registering allows access to some of the “social” features like building your profile, uploading photos, you know – the usual stuff that a social network offers.
For those not familiar with the project, the idea behind it is a human-edited search engine designed to be harder to spam. Human-edited like Wikiapedia and harder to spam un-like Google.
Since it is Alpha, the results are pretty bad at the moment. However, as more people visit the site, they are sure to improve in the coming weeks. Visitors are encouraged register and start working on the “mini-articles”. These will help to improve the search results and their purposes are listed as:
- Short definitions
- Disambiguations
- Photos
- See also
The other interesting feature of Wikia Search is that Wales feels he can grab about 5% of the Search market, which could be possible considering Wikia Search incorporates the human-edited aspect of Wikiapedia and adds Social Networking features as well. But, if the interest wanes after a few months, that might be a bit ambitious. Currently, there is a great buzz surrounding the project, but that usually happens anytime something like this is launched. The trick will be to maintain and increase the level of user participation, which will be helped by the Social aspect I am sure.
More to follow as we play around with it, but don’t wait for us – try it for yourself.
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