Marketing Pilgrim

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s Friday. Woot.

• German Google Webmaster Central blog has a fun interview with Matt Cutts on porn, big feet and spam. The post has a German translation of the transcript, but the video itself is in English.
• Need help with Google Webmaster Toots, Google Analytics and/or Google Website Optimizer? An hour-long YouTube webinar covering all three is now live (via).
• CNET says Eric Schmidt thinks Google will hit the mother lode when they get YouTube advertising right. Good thing they’re still brainstorming.

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Yahoo’s letter to shareholders yesterday was just the first step in their latest defense against Carl Icahn’s attempts to elect a proxy board at the shareholder meeting in two weeks. Today, Yahoo and its allies strike two more blows.

First, Yahoo has begun leveraging one of its biggest assests—one of (if not the) most popular home pages on the Internet. Yahoo has put a notice about the pending board election below the fold. TechCrunch spotted this earlier today, with a box on the Yahoo home page below-the-fold reading “Your Yahoo!. Your Vote.” An alternate form of the box, as seen by CNET, reads “We have a couple of exclamation points to make.” Finally, a third iteration quotes Carl Icahn:

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[Something snappy!]

• Ooh, shiny! Google Enables Local Reviews From Mobile Phones. Too bad when I last “upgraded” my phone, it downgraded my mobile browser (and my battery life, and my T9 and my . . . anyway) and I can’t do jack anymore. (via)
• Google confirms the new contact-adding system for Gmail, but not everyone is happy—or less creeped out. Plus, it’s confusing, apparently.
• Yeah, that’s totally ethical: Google cofounder funnels money to wife’s startup through Michael J. Fox charity. At least the charity and the startup have similar purposes: genetic research, curing Parkinson’s. And now the startup is signing up Parkinson’s patients for a genetic study. Hm….

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I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. Somehow, by using every cliché in the book, I think I just guaranteed that I’ll always have get to be the one covering Microsoft/Yahoo/Google deal news. Well, today we’ll go with mixed sport metaphors. Mixing metaphors is even more fun than just using them!

Okay, so let’s hit one out of the park, shall we? There’s a new letter to Yahoo shareholders today—from Yahoo itself. It’s quite long, and since I’ve been working on synopses today, I’ll go ahead and boil this one down give you just the box score on this one, too. But just because I like you.

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A very Googly goodness for today!

• The followup on Amit Singhal’s basic post on Google ranking: Technologies behind Google ranking
• FINALLY. I’ve only complained about this all the time here—now Gmail will give you the ability to opt out of automatically adding every person you’ve ever emailed to your contacts. I didn’t mind having them in my contacts so much, but having all their addresses pop up when I type in an email address, having them all in my Google chat and having them all as “Friends” in Google Reader was a bit much.

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Sigh. Andy, Andy, Andy. Always taking the good stories and leaving me to cover Yahoo/Google/Microsoft and their latest flings. Well, let’s get to it, shall we? Let’s spin the wheel of metaphors and see what we’ll use today . . . Mixed sports—no, sailing! Sailing it is!

(Apologies in advance if I go a little overboard. Oops, I think I already have.)

Back on the Eastern front (oops, sorry, yesterday’s metaphor)—in the capital, Microsoft has sailed into the pending Google and Yahoo search ad deal during Senate hearings on the topic—and as we mentioned in today’s Picks, they’re making quite a splash in claiming that the Y/G deal would monopolize 90% of the search market. But come on, are they wrong?

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Oh, it’s the ides of July! How ominous. Do you think it’ll bode poorly for any of these headlines?

• Twitter says it’s official: they’ve acquired Summize, the Twitter search tool.
• Not everyone wants to tell Yahoo they’re doin it wrong. BusinessWeek has found people that actually think Yahoo’s doin it AWESOME. Or at least somewhat right.
• We love to tell you about what a difference testimonials and user reviews can make to your visitors. But are your testimonials properly optimized?

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Yahoo is in the midst of a three-front war—and yet not one of these fights is for dominance in any field of operations business.

The Eastern Front
Dateline Washington, DC. Yahoo is facing a Senate hearing on the Yahoo/Google search ads deal today. paidContent reports:

Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will point out . . . that the agreement does not expand Google’s share of the search market, and that the alternative outcome, Yahoo selling to Microsoft, would be much worse for competition.

Aside from facing the Senate now and other regulatory committees later, Yahoo and Google will face individual states, which are also subpoenaing them.

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Google announces a new program today to work with web hosts to integrate Google Webmaster Tools for their users.

The Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider program features APIs to enable web hosts to offer their subscribers access to Webmaster Tools. Subscribers will be able to create Webmaster Tools accounts and submit sitemaps without leaving hosts’ control panels.

In all, this is a boon to web hosts, since they’ll be able to add value for their subscribers. Subscribers wouldn’t be forced to participate in Webmaster Tools, but easy access to information to help new and inexperienced webmasters understand how their site is doing in Google would probably be pretty popular. Google gets sites that are better optimized and more relevant in its index.

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I knew you were wondering, since none of us are sure these days, but Yahoo is still giving it the old college try. Here’s the latest from the Yahoo battlefront.

Although a few of our commentators insist that the Yahoo/Microsoft deal is all but inevitable, Rupert Murdoch disagrees. And I think he might know—after all, his properties, especially News Corp, have been courted by both sides almost since the beginning for support in brokering and/or funding a deal.

Murdoch said at the Allen & Co conference:

There won’t be a deal. There’s bad personal feelings. In six months, (Microsoft) will walk away.

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The US Senate is holding a series of hearings on online advertising, behavioral targeting and privacy to determine whether they should consider legislation protecting consumers online in these areas.

The Senate has turned to Google, Microsoft, the FTC, Facebook, privacy watchdogs and others for their opinions in the matter. Some, like Google, welcomed a “comprehensive privacy law that would establish a uniform framework for privacy and procedures to punish bad actors.”

The FTC, on the other hand, believes that the industry could self-regulate: “The commission is cautiously optimistic that the privacy issues raised by online behavioral advertising can be effectively addressed through self-regulation.”

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Oh my goodness, it’s Linky Goodness!

• Though we mentioned this morning that YouTube’s overhauling its advertising system, another important point in the WSJ article is that YouTube will be running both preroll and postroll ads soon.
• More on the Yahoo/Microsoft Saga. (I’m so tired of this. I’ve had to resort to creative writing at work to make myself report the news.) Today, Jerry Yang is saying that Microsoft is intentionally trying to destabilizing Yahoo, Microsoft’s refusal to negotiate is baffling, and, oh yeah, he’s not resigning.

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