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Daily Search Forum Recap: February 19, 2010

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 10:00pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Forum Recap

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: February 19, 2010

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 9:20pm CET by rustybrick

In this week's recap, we cover the big news that Microsoft and Yahoo received approval to move forward with their search deal - which means the end of Yahoo Search to me. Bing is crawling and indexing faster. Bing is going to fix their search filter in March. 60% of publishers say their earnings are down with Google AdSense. AdSense seems to be testing in-line video ads. Is Google mixing paid with free listings? Yahoo Search ads are not sending enough traffic to advertisers. Google Image Search is faster with their filter. Google changed how they show image sources. Are you Google PageRank Certified? YouTube will no longer support IE6 users on March 13th. We got your logos from President's Day, Valentine's Day and the Winter Olympics. That was this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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Search Topics of Discussion:

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Facts For Webmasters & Advertisers: Yahoo Out Of Search, Bing Takes Over

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 2:25pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Search Engine Industry News

It is official, Yahoo and Microsoft have approval to move forward with their search deal and they are not wasting any time with that. You can read many of the stories on Techmeme to catch up, but let me quote the official press release, at least a snippet:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - News) and Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO - News) announced today that they have received clearance for their search agreement, without restrictions, from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission, and will now turn their attention to beginning the process of implementing the deal.
Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.

Important Facts for Webmasters & Advertisers:

Algorithmic search on Yahoo will be powered by Bing in the United States by the end of 2010.
Search advertisers will be migrated from YSM to adCenter prior to the 2010 holiday season, but may wait until 2011.
All global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.
Yahoo BOSS, Search Monkey & SiteExplorer are all still up in the air but if Yahoo is not crawling the web, Bing would have to build out their own tools going forward.
Also, check out the Yahoo Transition Center for additional details

Of course, most of you know my thoughts about where this puts Yahoo. Yahoo, in my opinion, is out of search now. And most of you agree, the poll we ran a week or so ago, has over a hundred responses (see poll pie chart above) and 60% said Yahoo is not in search, 20% are hoping they are but are unsure. Just sad.

Forum discussion at many places:

Search Deal Approved, WebmasterWorld
Microsoft-Yahoo search deal approved, DigitalPoint Forums
Yahoo and Adcenter Announcement, Search Engine Watch Forums
Microsoft And Yahoo! Team Up To Take On Google, HighRankings Forums
The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, Search Engine Watch Forums
The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, DigitalPoint Forums
The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, WebmasterWorld
Yahoo & Bing = ???, Google AdWords Help

Yahoo Search Ads Not Driving Necessary Traffic Volume

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 2:17pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Yahoo Search Marketing

Yes, I know Yahoo and Microsoft got approval to move forward with their search deal (I'll link to my post on that, when I write it, in about 10 minutes from this post), but Yahoo Search Marketing has been a failure for many in the past few months. And since Yahoo Search Ads will likely continue to be powered by Yahoo until December of this year, this is still important.

A WebmasterWorld thread has posts from several disgruntled Yahoo Search advertisers. They are all pretty much complaining about the same thing - search volume. Yes, the number of people seeing and clicking on their search ads, compared to the previous years, has dropped significantly. Let me pull out some quotes:

This year we notice Yahoo PPC struggling to generate decent volume for us. Its getting worse and worse, and all the new measures they are taking to ensure good quality traffic are infact killing our traffic.

I think part of your PPC woes are exemplified in that YPN payouts completely died for me, removed it, which I'm sure many others have done, thus eliminating millions of page impressions previously available.

For the last two months we underspent our budget, so I have noticed this too.

Yahoo has been fully aware of the Microsoft deal - so why invest? Yes, Yahoo has added features recently, but those features should have been added over a year ago. In any event, by years end - this likely won't matter anyway. More on that shortly.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Images Change How They Display Sources?

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 2:02pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Google Search Engine

I do not watch Google Images all that closely, but there is a guy in the WebmasterWorld forums who said Google images changed how they display the source of the image. I believe what he is saying is that if you use site:domain.com in Google Images, in the past, it would display not just the images hosted on that domain, but all images used on that domain and also show the source of it under it, i.e. like flickr.com and so on.

This is probably best explained using pictures. Let me first show you that a search for site:seroundtable on Google Images only shows images on the web site, but those images can be hotlinked (i.e. sourced) from off the web site:

Let's take the first picture as an example, that image is actually from searchmarketinggurus.com:

Google knows it, a similar images command returns the proper source:

Same with Flickr Images for standard searches. It will show the site the image is on but not where it is sourced until you click through:

By the way, that is a picture of me, not Lee Odden.

The original poster described it as follows:

Tonight I noticed a change in the image-search. Until yesterday google shows with the question "site:www.site.com" all pictures that are sourced in that domain.

But now it shows only pictures that link to the domain.

Again, I am not sure if this is new behavior of if am seeing the new behavior or not.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bing Webmaster Tools Mysterious Missing Domains?

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 1:54pm CET by rustybrick

Tags: Microsoft MSN Search

A Bing Community thread has reports that when webmasters authenticate domains within Bing Webmaster Tools, the next day, the domains are no longer listed. Supposedly there are several reports about this in the past week or so.

Here is one report:

I (for the very first time) submitted several URL's, and I also authenticated my website by adding a LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml to my website sites, and I also submitted a sitemap.xml. They all showed yesterday.
But when I login today, I don't see any of my URL's from yesterday.

Brett Yount from Bing said that he is really not sure what is going on but he doesn't seem to be the only one reporting the issue. Brett said:

This is the third or fourth post I've seen today regarding this problem. I'm contacting our devs to find out more information.

This is not a confirmed report yet, but there seems to be something fishy going on here.

Forum discussion at Bing Community.

SEO News » Search Engine Roundtable » February 19, 2010

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