WebConnoisseur

Caught this today when performing a search for other engines while on Yahoo. First time I’ve seen an engine attempt to keep their users from jumping to another engine, which is very common practice as indicated by my Actual Top 10 Search Terms of 2006 post.

I was performing a search for MSN search (or “Live”) in Yahoo because I didn’t have it in my Firefox search dropdown.

Here’s what I saw:

I wasn’t paying very close attention and started typing in my search into the Yahoo shortcut search box shown above. Notice it says: “You could go to MSN. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

I can’t recall seeing this before, so I decided to see if they were doing the same thing to Google (which has got to be one of the 10 most popular search terms on Yahoo):

Again, notice it says: “You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers.”

Seems strange to have a Yahoo shortcut for something you were already immersed in. What do you think about this? Is it right? Would Yahoo be pissed if Microsoft or Google did the same?

Finally some solid evidence showing how long the long tail of search really is! Having worked for some big high-traffic sites, I was always discouraged with the underestimation of the true length of the long tail in other public reports. Finally I did my own research and it was published on the Hitwise blog:

Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search

Here’s a sneak peak:

“After great dissatisfaction with the existing research, which I felt vastly understated the true size of the long tail, I decided to do my own research…There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

Understanding the long tail and how to target it from an SEO standpoint is no simple task. I hope this article sheds some light on how important long tail traffic is.

In my experience, I’ve ranked for head terms and I’ve ranked for millions of tail terms. I’d gladly trade in the head terms for a larger piece of the tail. A few companies have learned this, including the search engines, but they’d prefer you don’t know how much of a gold mine it really is.

Being a small company in-house SEO for the past decade has made getting to conferences difficult for me, but I’ve managed to attend a lot of search conferences and still find them very valuable (not so much the sessions themselves, but the out of session/networking conversations). Here’s what I’ve got on schedule for the remainder of the year:

August: SES San Jose
This must be my 4th or 5th SES San Jose in a year. I’ve been there as an attendee, a speaker, and now will attend as press. I look forward to covering the event, but will only be attending Sunday night through Wednesday night. Hope to see you there.

October: MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Arizona

Never been to a MarketingProfs event and never been to Arizona. Looking forward to this event. You’ll find me speaking on link building tactics.

November: PubCon
Hoping to attend PubCon this year – it will be my 3rd in a row if I do attend. I’ve covered the event as press, as an attendee and hope to attend as a speaker this year (though it appears many of the speaking spots have already been assigned).

Hope to see you at one of these events! Also, let me know if there are any others I should consider attending.

I attended my first Jane and Robot event on June 25th at the office of Ignition Partners. As you might suspect, a search event geared towards developers & designers attracts your regular assortment of web geeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the audience was dissapointed that they never got to lay eyes on Jane, nor meet the Robot.

Jeff Pollard gave a rapid talk on AJAX SEO pitfalls. Though it was nothing new to me, the audience seemed to receive it well – Jeff’s really knows his stuff. What I was most surprised by was the number of people I hadn’t met before and the Q&A afterwards. People asked very pointed questions like: “Does PPC affect your organic rankings” and “if we are already crawled well, why should we use sitemaps?”

I really appreciate Vanessa Fox and Nathan Buggia volunteering their time to educate developers on white-hat SEO and creating an opportunity for SEOs to meet up from time-to-time. Jane and Robot is a service that should be embraced and promoted by those in the search industry.

Last year, I gave out some SMX attendee tips which still apply to the 2nd installment this year.

Outside of those tips, this year I recommend using the SMX Connect service by Crowdvine to learn about and pre-set up the people you want to meet. Unfortunately, not everyone is using it, so I also recommend doing what I did last year and am doing with this post: write about SMX Advanced & link to others who are writing about attending as well. I meet some great people last time who I am still closely connected with after doing so.

Other’s excited about attending SMX Advanced whom I don’t believe I’ve met yet:

• Justin Davy
• Sean McMahon
• Dana Larson
• Eric Lander

I finally made my first visit to Google Kirkland a couple days ago for a study. I’ve been to Google’s HQ several times, but had never visited the local campus. Well, I suppose it isn’t really a campus – I’d call it a shared office building with lots of cool Google logo art and not much else.

I didn’t get to tour the entire building, but spent some time in the lobby & in the R&D areas. In the lobby, they were playing what I assumed to be the rolling search ticker I’ve seen at their parties on the wall, but the projector was much too weak to discern the text, so I it seemed like a waste. I imagine the janitors enjoy it when the lights are off. Overall, the space was unimpressive for Google, but I’m sure the new Google Kirkland campus will rock.

The one unintentional piece of humor I discovered was when I was getting my badge. They have you sit down and type in your info, then choose between visitor types:

• Normal
• Government

I joked that I didn’t realize they were mutually exclusive.

Photo credit: PRWeaver Blog

We’ve all seen Google change their logo in recognition of holidays, but today marks the most dramatic change I’ve ever seen Google make to their homepage. Take a look at this screenshot (yes, this was Google’s actual homepage on March 29th):

Turns out it was a gesture to raise awareness for Earth Hour – a worldwide conservation effort where everyone turns off their lights at 8pm to 9pm on March 29th. Not sure if it will save much energy, though it probably serves as a visual indicator of those participating (having people turn off their TVs or computers from 8-9pm would probably conserve more energy).

I find the first paragraph comical because it is almost a direct stab at Blackle.com (a customized black version of Google which claims to have saved 536,046.240 Watt hours):

“[in regards to the one-day only black version of Google]… As to why we don’t do this permanently – it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display.”

Gotta love how Google tries to be different: once Google went black, it chose to go back.

It appears that Digg is finally closer to being purchased. The leading candidates are Google and Microsoft. While the final owner won’t be known for probably another month, the future of Digg is known:

If Google buys Digg, it will become Gigg.

Rather than trusting pesky humans to digg news stories, Google will implement an algorithm developed by a team of PhDs based on previous digg analytics data. The new algorithm will look something like this:

if (headline ((pro-Microsoft, -50, anti-Microsoft, +50) (“Apple”, +100) (any game title, +35)) + if (content contains (Scantily clad women, +85, -25) (“Hack”, +35, -5) (displays ads, -20)…

If Microsoft buys Digg, it will quickly become Dugg.

Dugg will be the result of the dust that quickly develops on Digg as it suddenly becomes uncool. To make matters worse, Microsoft will implement content restrictions like no Microsoft bashing, no discussions of Apple or Google, and all gaming diggs must be Microsoft-created games only. Within weeks, Dugg will be the wayback machine of the social news site once known as Digg.

Ask will build a competing product to Microsoft Dugg called “Doug” to add a human element to the archive, but you will have to search news stories with questions like, “What male celebrity is a little bitch?”

Never thought I’d see the day that Microsoft would make a bid for Yahoo. There’s so much overlap and the difficulties of becoming to big of a company just got bigger. I’m happy to see Google get stiffer competition, but I’m not sure how it will play out other than Microsoft immediately getting a larger share of search.

For the best coverage of the Microsoft bid for Yahoo, hop on over to Search Engine Land.

I’ll be speaking at SEMpdx on March 10th at the Portland Zoo. Still trying to figure out if it is really a ploy to lock me up with the animals. “Oh… look at the cute SEO flicking boogars at the crowd.”

You can catch me at the links session with another Seattlite, SEOMoz’s Rebecca Kelley. You can also take a look at my Searchfest mini-interview with Todd Mintz where I answer these questions:

• 1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living?
• 2) If a newbie ask you to describe the importance of link-building, what would you tell them?
• 3) Do you see stocks backed by domain names as their principal assets (e.g. Marchex) as good investments short & long term?