I know we all miss Andy. I’m sure he misses us, too, if he ever thinks about the blogosphere while vacationing in Tahiti (but why would you?).
I know I’m a poor substitute for Mr. Beal himself, so here’s something to make us all feel better: a video interview with Andy. Podtech Networks’ Jennifer Jones interviewed Andy on SEO. Enjoy (and don’t worry; Andy will be back next week)!
Chris Sherman at Search Engine Land posts about Pandia’s custom search engine search, the Search Engine Detective, which lets you search top search engine information sites. One option is to narrow your search to their top 25 sites about search engines. “This way,” Pandia says, “you get the perspective of industry insiders and old-timers — nothing but the best.”
Who made their top 25? Here’s Pandia’s list:
It’s been two days since USA TODAY redesigned its site, adding serious social components. The new social features include the ability to make comments on news stories, “recommend” stories or comments, review movies and music, discuss in forums, contribute photos and more.
USATODAY says that the redesign impacts more than just the look and feel of their online presence:
While we’ve refined the design, we’ve also expanded the journalistic mission: Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events.
In addition to the visual and social changes, USATODAY has “cleaned up the layout, simplified the navigation, improved ‘search’, and made it easier to find related stories.”
William Randolph Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887. Since then, and even after his death, his empire has continued to grow. 120 years later, the media conglomerate that started with the San Francisco Examiner owns dozens of newspapers, magazines and television channels—and would like to ‘pwn’ YouTube.
Hearst has already begun its online video channels with TeenMag.com‘s branded video player. Hearst plans 12 more channels to be debut over the next three months, including branded players for magazine sites like Good Housekeeping, Esquire and Cosmopolitan.
Hearst relies on MSN for online video syndication now, but VP & General Manager of Hearst Magazines Digital Media Chuck Corddry says, “We may or may not avail ourselves of the syndication portion of the product.”
Neo@Ogilvy/GSI
Neo@Ogilvy, the digital & direct media arm of Ogilvy, acquired Global Strategies International, “a leading search marketing consultancy,” they announced Friday. GSI specializes in SEO, brand reputation management and training.
In their press release, Neo@Ogilvy said of the merger:
“Search marketing cannot live in a silo anymore,” said Nasreen Madhany, Global CEO of Neo@Ogilvy. “It needs to be part of a 360 strategy for delivering marketing solutions. When managed holistically, search marketing can deliver branding as well as business results. The integration of GSI into Neo@Ogilvy will allow us to deliver end-to-end digital marketing solutions to clients throughout Neo’s global network.”
GSI will keep its founders, including recently elected SEMPO board member Bill Hunt, to “maintain its own identity within Neo@Ogilvy.”
On the Webmaster Central blog, Google has made some clarifications on how the site command works. By adding excluding the www in front of the domain you are doing a site command search for, you can include subdomains in the results.
A search for www.site.com returns URLs that begin with www and a search for site.com returns URLs for all subdomains. (So, site:google.com returns URLs such as www.google.com, checkout.google.com, and finance.google.com).
To demonstrate, site:www.marketingpilgrim.com returns 3,110 results and site:marketingpilgrim.com returns 3,180 taking into account the subdomain jobs.marketingpilgrim.com
Unfortunately, if your site either purposely or through bad planning has non www pages indexed such as http://domain.com/page.html, then those pages will not be returned in the www search and you cannot get an accurate reading of your main domains index. You will either need to fix the issue through a 301 htaccess rule or through the Google Webmaster Central backend.
Last week, Rand Fishkin accurately identified several reasons why Fortune 500s and other large corporations can’t blog. While I found myself vehemently agreeing with everything he said, I got to the end and wanted to hear the other side of the story. (It’s a character flaw.) I thought I’d give it a shot.
If you’re a big enough brand, people are already interested in you
They’re probably talking about you. They may even be interested in what you have to say. You have a built in audience. There are about 50 million bloggers who would kill to have that.
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