Organic SEO Blog

Sometime back, Yahoo raised its minimum bid from $0.05 to $.10, and those current bids under 5 and 10 cents, which its users had been using earlier were called Grandfather Bids and so on. And now, they are trying to follow Google’s policy of no minimum bids….. Following is the official notification from Y!

Starting in the next several weeks(we are not sure about ourselves), the minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10(why so? and who used them?).

This update is intended to align your minimum bids with the value and quality of your keywords(just like google, we used to follow them always). It also is designed to help improve the overall search user experience by rewarding advertisers for better quality with lower entry points into keyword markets.

The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as(blah blah blah):

• The relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them)
• The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

A keyword term becomes “active” — switched “on” in the system (again we are copying google as such) and eligible for display — when your bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid. If your bid falls below your minimum, your keyword will not be displayed. You’ll be notified of such changes and will have some time to adjust your bid.

comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace. Google Sites marginally extended its share of core searches to 58.5 percent. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.2 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.8 percent), AOL LLC (4.9 percent), and Ask Network (4.5 percent).

comScore Core Search Report* - January 2008
Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0Share of Searches (%)

Core Search Entity              Dec-07          Jan-08            Change
Total Core Search                  100.0%          100.0%            0.0
Google Sites                        58.4%           58.5%            0.1
Yahoo! Sites                        22.9%           22.2%           -0.7
Microsoft Sites                      9.8%            9.8%            0.0
AOL LLC**                            4.6%            4.9%            0.3
Ask Network                          4.3%            4.5%            0.2

*  Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
cross-channel searches.  Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
** In January 2008, Time Warner Network was split into two distinct
properties: AOL LLC and Time Warner Network excluding AOL, with AOL LLC
representing the core search business.

Global giants including Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are believed to be considering rival bids for the internet company Yahoo, which has received a $44.6bn (£22.6bn) offer from Microsoft.

The conglomerate InterActiveCorp was another company named as a potential bidder for Yahoo, which is said to be unwilling to give in to Microsoft without a fight.

After Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer made the offer in a letter on Thursday, it emerged that Yahoo had rejected a similar takeover attempt by Ballmer’s organisation a year before.

Yahoo chief executive and co-founder Jerry Yang is understood not to be Microsoft’s greatest fan, and would be prepared to line up another ‘white knight’ rather than concede to Ballmer.

It is believed he would be particularly open to a rescue bid from Steve Jobs’ Apple Corp, having openly expressed his admiration for the firm in the past.

Although Microsoft is still the leading technology company in the world, it is believed its position could soon be threatened if it doesn’t turn around its loss-making internet arm and increase its share of the online advertising market.

Recent figures show that Google dominates 66% of the global web search market. Yahoo and Microsoft are leagues behind with just 13% and 4% of the market respectively.

Yahoo is testing the integration of data from their Delicious social bookmarking site within its search results. A search in Yahoo will now show whether a page listed in its results is also in Delicious and how it has been tagged.

For the time being, some users will see the Delicious icon as part of their normal search results, which indicates the number of people who have bookmarked those pages along with the tags people have supplied.

Delicious search was always popular for searching when there is no response from other standard search engines. With the new features, it will surely maintain its popularity. During 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious, the social bookmarking service created by Joshua Schachter.

http://alpha.search.wikia.com/ - Wikia Search, the most widely awaited search engine founded by Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut today, with the bet that an open-source, community-driven effort can disrupt and reshape this Google-dominated market. Like its older sibling Wikipedia, this new service will be run by a community of users.

Google employs proprietary technology and the details of its ranking algorithm is a closely guarded secret. With Wikia Search, Wales is betting on a very different approach: transparency.

Wikia Search also allows people to publish mini-articles that are added to search results. In the near future, users will be also asked to rate individual URLs.

While perhaps unlikely that Wikia Search will ever achieve the unprecedented worldwide user adoption that Google currently claims, it’s refreshing to see the current status quo being challenged. No one can argue that there is still a great deal of room for improvement in SERPs, and Wikia Search is a interesting step forward.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850

Wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2008.

“Another fresh new year is here . . .
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest . . .
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!

I have the opportunity
Once more to right some wrongs,
To pray for peace, to plant a tree,
And sing more joyful songs!”

Danny Sullivan left SearchEngineWatch.com more than a year back, and it seems that the site’s traffic has gone down since then.

Even though Alexa is not an accurate measure of traffic, it does provide some indication of how well the traffic for a site is, especially when compared to others in the same industry…

Google announced the international availability of its Custom Search platform allowing companies to add Google’s search technology to their websites. It primarily aims at small businesses and takes only a few minutes or just three steps to sign up and deploy this service.

The platform allows users to integrate search into personal and community sites and blogs, and developers can use the Google Custom Search APIs to allow searching from within their applications.The Google Custom Search platform is now available in 40 languages in close to 80 countries worldwide.

Syed of tKF suggested this recently after we tasted success with SearchCamp, a two day event on Search @ Tidel Park, Chennai

We’ll have to create an association of Indian SEO/SEM professionals to work towards increasing awareness of the value of Search Engine Marketing in India.

If any of you are interested in being part of this, please let us know. We’ll have to start something like this soon, and I’m very sure that each of us are looking for some kind of Search related affiliation to be part of…

A two-day Professional SEO Skills seminar will be conducted in Chennai by Ash Nallawalla during the 19th and 20th of January 2008.

Ash is a Speaker in the WebmasterWorld PubCon and was one of the five members of the Advisory Board in the recent SearchCamp held in Chennai. He has worked on hundreds of real-world business websites and offers SEO and PPC training in Melbourne, Australia.

He has over 17 years of experience in manager to director-level positions in product marketing, product management, sales, search engine marketing and CRM. Past employers included Deloittes, PWC, Unisys, Hayes Microcomputer Products, Tennyson Technologies, Selectica, Macromedia, and Melbourne IT. He is currently the CEO of trainSEM, which offers corporate consulting in search marketing, on-site or classroom based SEO training and PPC training.

The two-day program is priced at Rs 8,000, and there is an offer in which 4 people can attend for the price of three, if the payment is made with one cheque.