Marketing Pilgrim

Yahoo India has launched a new feature in their search results called “Glue” pages. As Barry Schwartz explains:

Glue Pages are specialized pages that contain an enhanced visual search result page, for select search queries. The search results that trigger the special “Glue Pages” run across searches in health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance categories.

The new pages are not quite equivalent with Google’s Universal Search blended SERPs, as the various types of information are broken out into separate columns. Instead the results more closely resemble those of Ask3D.

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Google has announced enhanced features for custom search engines: the integration of sitemaps and AdSense for Search.

The new features will improve search results in a Google custom search engine for your site if you utilize sitemaps:

Custom Search is built on top of the Google index. This means that all pages that are available on Google.com are also available to your search engine. We’re now maintaining a CSE-specific index in addition to the Google.com index for enhancing the performance of search on your site. If you submit a Sitemap, it’s likely that we will crawl those pages and include them in the additional index we build.

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The guys at the eCommerce & Entrepreneurship Blog would like to point out that Google is trying to redefine search engine optimization (SEO) so that we all focus on the "on page" enhancements, not the "off page" link enhancements–you know the stuff that makes up the bulk of Google’s algorithm.

Here’s how the Google Analytics team recently defined SEO:

OK, there are one of three things going on here:

1. Google’s trying to throw you off the scent deliberately, because they don’t want you to "adjust" your links.

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Yep, Yahoo working to make the world a safer place—to search.

Yahoo will now display warnings on SERPs to indicate that some of the sites listed in their results may not be entirely safe. Yahoo’s SearchScan feature will be a new default for SERPs served to the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain. Potentially dangerous sites will feature a highly visible red warning tag under the page title.

The advisories in action:

The advisories even specify what kind of dangers might lurk in the pages to come.

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Back in February, Yahoo announced SearchMonkey, a project that would allow site owners and developers to customize their search engine listings’ appearance and information. If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the release of this new tool, good news: today’s the day (for a limited release, anyway). The full release will be May 15th.

SearchMonkey creates customized listings for categories of pages on your site: e.g. all your product pages, all your profile pages, etc. Their original example looked at the difference between a plain Yelp listing in Yahoo results:

And a SearchMonkey-enhanced listing:

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Does your internet marketing agency have it’s business strategy figured our for 2008? Do you know how you’ll grow your revenues this year?

Since becoming a consultant, I’ve been blessed to be able to work with some of the smartest search marketers around, and help them grow their business.

I don’t always get to reveal which companies I work with, but thanks to Lance Loveday of Closed Loop Marketing for sharing this testimonial:

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When I saw Google had posted an official guide to redirecting an old domain to a new one, I Twittered the link to the 1700+ people following me. This morning I had lots of notes saying the link was broken! To make it up to you all, I’m posting the news again, this time to the blog.

So, here’s the deal. You should know that the best way to move a web site from one domain to another, is using a 301 permanent redirect. It’s not that hard, if you know what you’re doing. Still, there’s always the concern–actually it’s more like a gut-wrenching feeling–that you’ll do something out of synch, and lose all your precious Google rankings.

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Less than a week after we implored Yahoo to offer newly acquired IndexTools’ web analytics for free, it appears it’s doing just that.

Now, before everyone bails on this post and rushes over to the IndexTools web site, there’s a caveat to the offer.

As explained on the IndexTools blog, IndexTools is currently only being offered free to current partners and only if they accept a new Yahoo agreement.

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It was announced on Friday via the Google Webmaster Central Blog that the search engine has been experimenting with crawling through html forms in order to more fully index sites.

The search engine is filling out forms on a “small number of particularly useful sites” in order to bring forth the content that is populated by these forms and index these results.

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Remember earlier this week, someone was trying to trademark the acronym ‘SEO’? A helpful little comment on our post on that news just pointed me to the “enterprising marketer’s” response, posted Wednesday. And if you didn’t like his original idea, you’ll probably like this one even less.

First, Jason says that his exclusive ownership of the trademark won’t impede anyone else’s ability to sell SEO services:

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Web directories, especially high quality ones, are coveted links for search engine marketers. The holy grail is a link on DMOZ, but it’s pretty much unreachable. I know of someone who took great lengths to become an editor so he could get his site included. A few months later he resigned in frustration.

DMOZ is known to be backlogged and highly political. You stand more chance of getting a link on Wikipedia. Now web directory Best of the Web (BOTW.org) says they are going to compete with DMOZ, starting with hiring over 30 of the directory’s top editors.

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UPDATE, 11 April 2008: Gambert has responded to the community. He wants to use the SEO mark to enforce standards on the industry. We disagree.

Do you use the word “SEO” to describe what you do? Look out: an “enterprising” marketer (both of those words are used euphemistically) has set his sights on taking your livelihood—or at least your right to use that acronym. As SEOmoz’s Sarah Bird reports, one Jason Gambert has filed an application to trademark the acronym SEO.

Sarah has documented the ridiculous history of his application, begun almost a year ago, well. Among the highlights:

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