Marketing Pilgrim

Not since the year-long courtship between Yahoo and Microsoft have I wanted two sides to just DO IT ALREADY!

What am I talking about? China and Google.

For the love of my RSS stream, either pull out or make-up–this is getting old! The latest? Google is "99.9 percent" likely to shut down its Chinese search engine–and try to serve China from outside of the country.

The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.

I don’t often jump into the world of SEO advice–there are plenty of excellent blogs that do that–but when Google’s Matt Cutts confirms that 301 redirects do, in fact, lose PageRank, well, that’s worth sharing.

Eric Enge gets the scoop–boy, is he gonna get a lot of backlinks from this–getting Matt Cutts to confirm something that I have suspected and cautioned clients for many years: 301′ing from an old domain to another, does result in PageRank decay. Here’s the quote:

I can certainly see how there could be some loss of PageRank. I am not 100 percent sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented that sort of natural PageRank decay, so I will have to go and check on that specific case. (Note: in a follow on email, Matt confirmed that this is in fact the case. There is some loss of PR through a 301).

There are certain things that anyone can hear and automatically say “I don’t think that’ll work very well” without doing any real research. You hear something and you have a visceral reaction that just makes you go with your gut because it makes sense. Even in those kind of no-brainer situations it helps when your “gut” is validated by a reputable source who actually did a little research.

The latest case of this occurrence comes from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. As reported over at ars technica the prestigious group has done the research to help us all say that our collective gut is right on the money when it comes to paywalls for news: the idea pretty well sucks.

Google really created quite a buzz around Buzz when it was rolled out in February. The first wave of buzz (pun intended although the whole Wave thing is another story altogether) for Buzz was reasonable and was more about “What do I do with it?” than anything else. That was soon followed by the privacy outcry that became deafening and forced Google to admit that it had committed a major privacy faux pas.

Well, it appears that Buzz is still creating a stir this time at SXSW when a panel of Gmail and Buzz Googlers had to face the music, so to speak. TechCrunch reports

Sarah Haskins is part of InfoMania’s line up of commentators that pokes fun at mainstream media. Sarah’s biggest contribution is her recurring segment “Target Women.”

“Target Women” is a video commentary that takes a satirical look at television adverts that target women. As we can see above Sarah doesn’t hold back when discussing the rather broad generalizations that these commercials assume.

Watching a satirical commentary on television adverts exposes one of the major contrasts with broadcast media and the internet. Broadcast media is riddled with assumptions while the internet by its very nature is void of assumptions. Take for example the ads discussed above, they are completely based on the assumptions of the ad executives that created them, and as a result they fall victim to the risk of being irrelevant, ineffective, and annoying. Now, don’t get me wrong, mainstream ad agencies spend millions of dollars on market research, and demographic studies, all so they can make calculated assumptions. But, in the end they are still assumptions none the less!

comScore released a new study today examining the effects of display advertising in the European market—and it’s pretty dang impressive. The study (well, actually, report based on more than 20 studies) indicates that, despite minimal clicks on the ads themselves, “those exposed to online ad campaigns in Europe were 72 percent more likely to visit the advertiser’s website and 94 percent more likely to conduct a trademark search query on the advertiser’s brand, compared to a control group of similar Internet users who were not exposed to the campaigns.”

These figures are pretty staggering—especially when compared to US figures, which comScore reports as “an average lift of 49 percent in site visitation and 40 percent in trademark search queries across hundreds of ad effectiveness studies.” The European lift effects were most significant during the first week after exposure, but didn’t drop off dramatically.