Yahoo and Microsoft gain more market share but still Google leads way ahead

Some of the popular websites are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, & Ask. Among these search engines Yahoo & Microsoft showed increment where as Google declined to great extent compared to previous years. The percentage of searches handled in US by five search engines are 61.5%, 20.9%, 9.2%, 4.1%, & 4.3%. Finally, a change – Google slips while Yahoo and Microsoft gain. Now there comes a question whether Google is in trouble?? The answer will obviously be no because of raw number of searches, June 2008 was another record breaker for Google. But Google dropped from 61.8% in May 2008 to 61.5% in June 2008, the first time a share drop has been shown over the past year since December 2007 (when it went from 58.6% to 58.4%).On other hand Microsoft showed its first gain in the past year. After many months of incremental decline, Microsoft rose from an 8.5% share in May 2008 to 9.2% in June 2008. This is likely a factor in Microsoft’s rise. By this it has achieved great success but at the same time Microsoft is hoping that program will generate more than a 0.7% rise in its share, and that’s all it has gotten so far. Clearly the program isn’t a massive initial game changer that some thought it to be. Instead, if Cash back is going to be a success, clearly now it will be something that happens over time. Let’s see if that indeed happens in the coming months. The other hand even yahoo too is showing a rise. After months of drops with the occasional rise, Yahoo posts two straight months of gains, i.e. 20.4% in April 2008 to 20.6% in May, then 20.9 percent in June 2008. I think there’s great rise in Yahoo & Microsoft. Lets see the actual number of searches each handled versus market share:
Google: 7.1 billion
Yahoo: 2.4 billion
Microsoft: 1.1 billion
Ask: 501 million
AOL: 471 million
By this we can tell that Google still shows a gain. Google went over the 7 billion searches served mark. Whereas Yahoo, at 2.4 billion searches, & Microsoft, at just over 1 billion searches, which didn’t break any past records but at least got closer to territory it held a year ago. On the whole there is a great increment in yahoo & Microsoft compared to previous years & Google declined a bit but then too created a record!

YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN

YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN

Yahoo who is a leading global Internet company announced that it has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn to settle their pending proxy contest related to the Company’s 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, eight members of Yahoo’s current Board of Directors will stand for re-election at the 2008 annual meeting. In view of the settlement agreement with Mr. Icahn, and the termination of the proxy contest, Robert Kotick who is one of the board members has decided not to stand for re-election to the Board at the 2008 annual meeting & following 2008 annual meeting Yahoo board will be expanded to 11 members. Carl Icahn will be appointed to the Board. As part of the settlement agreement, Mr. Icahn, who owns an aggregate of 68,786,320 shares, or 4.98% of Yahoo common stock, has agreed to withdraw his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting and to vote his Yahoo shares in support of the Board’s nominees. Yahoo chairman told that they are gratified to have reached this agreement, which serves the best interests of all Yahoo Stockholders. And they look forward to work productively with Carl and the new members of the Board in continuing to improve the Company’s performance and enhancing stockholder value. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang told that agreement will not only allow Yahoo to put the distraction of the proxy contest behind us, it will also allow the Company to continue pursuing its strategy of being the starting point for Internet users and a must buy for advertiser. Icahn is very pleased that this settlement will allow him to work in partnership with Yahoo’s Board and management team to help the Company achieve its full potential. He believes that this is a good outcome and he’ll have a strong working relationship going forward. He is also happy that the board has agreed in the settlement agreement that any meaningful transaction, including the strategy in dealing with that transaction, will be fully discussed with the entire board before any final decision is made. On the whole both the parties are ready for this agreement & yahoo being a world-class company with an extremely bright future, and collaborating together, I believe, the Company achieves its ambitious goals.

Google’s Amit Singhal talks about technologies behind Google

Amit Singhal – Google Fellow and senior Google scientist has come up with a beautiful explanation on how well the technologies work behind the ranking algorithm of Google,

I agree with Amit that Search has come a long way from being a just a search engine to understanding more of users queries on what they want. Now Search engines can understand synonyms, complicated queries, language queries and a lot more of these type of stuff that were once far away from Google.

As per Amit Google has grown to a massive index from what it had been before. Now they have an index in multiple tera bytes before it used to be some Gigs Only. Now Google’s advancement in understanding pages had come a long way before it used to just be the keywords on the page title, and the backlink anchor text now it has become much more better. As he points out in the article even without the phrase “galleria sprovieri londra” the site sprovieri.com ranks No.1 because Google has much more sophisticated system to identify the authority of
a site.

Some of the examples he has given for understanding queries is excellent. Kofee annan is for someone searching for kofi annan and Google does say whether you are looking for it, similarly when someone searches for Dr.Zhivago then he is actually searching for a Dr with the name Zhivago where as when he is searching for “rodeo dr” he is actually searching for Rodeo Dr a road . similarly he talks about other queries like “back bumper repair” ramstein Ab, b&b ab which searches for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta.

The most surprising query is the one where he talks about the new york times square’s famous church. Obviously New york times or Ny times refer to the famous magazine or website Nytimes.com. Now when a search like “new york times square church” Google has to figure out that its actually about the church in Madison square New york. Now when you check the query Google actually understands it pretty well and guides to the right site. Similarly as Amit Points out understanding the users are an other major factor. Google has to be the best in figuring out where the users actually came from that way they have the option to understand and deliver relevant results based on their local area requirements. Google does this very effectively.

Overall Google has been doing a great job and i wish Amit and everyone behind Google’s algorithm to bring more innovative things

Official Blog post here
Vijay,

How to submit a re-inclusion request Google’s official video – transcripted by SRequesting reconsideration in Google how to remove banned site – Video

Requesting reconsideration in Google how to remove banned site – Video transcript

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team

Hai I am Mariya Moeva from the Google Search Quality Team and I like to talk to you about reconsideration requests. In this video we will go over one how to submit a reconsideration request for your site. Lets take a webmaster lady here as an example. Ricky a hard working webmaster who works on his ancient politics blog everyday lets call it example.com one day he checks and sees that his site no longer appears in Google search results. Lets see some things to know whether he needs to submit reconsideration requests. First he needs to check whether his sites disappearance from the index may be caused by access issues. You can do that too by logging into your webmaster tools account on the overview page you will be able to see when was the last time Google-bot successfully accessed your webpage. Here you can also check whether there are any crawling errors for example if your server was busy or unavailable when we try to access your site you would get an URL unreachable message alternatively there will be URLs on your site blocked by your robots.txt file you can see this by URLs restricted by robots.txt.

If these URLs are not what you expected you can go to tools and select analyze robots.txt here you can see whether you robots.txt file is properly formatted and only blocking parts of your site that you don’t want Google to crawl. If google has no problems accessing your site check to see if there is a message waiting for you in the message center of your webmaster tools account. This is the place where Google uses to communicate with you an put information to you on webmaster tools account in the sites that you manage. If we see that there is something wrong with your site we may send you a message there detailing things you need to fix to get back your site in compliance with Google webmaster guidelines. Ricky logs into his webmaster tools account and checked that there are no new messages. He doesn’t find any messages if you don’t find any message in the message center check to see if your site has been on is in violation on Google’s webmaster guidelines you can find that in the help center under the topic creating a Google friendly site how to make my site perform best in Google. If you are not sure why Google is not including your site a great place to look for help is our Google webmaster help group there you will find many friendly and knowledgeable webmasters and Googler’s who will be happy to look at your site and give suggestions on what you might need to fix,

You can find links to both the help center and the Google help group at Google.com/webmasters to get to the bottom of why his site has disappeared from the index Ricky opens the webmaster guidelines and starts reading. In quality guidelines we specifically mention completing avoiding hidden text or hidden links on the page. He remember that at one point he hired a friend named Liz who claimed to say he knows something about web design and that he can make the site rank better in Google. Then he scans his site completely and finds blocks of hidden text on footer of all his pages. IF your site is in violation of Google webmaster guidelines and if you think this might have affected the way your site is ranked in Google now will be a good time to submit a reconsideration request. But before you do that make changes to your site so that it falls between the Google

S webmaster guidelines. Ricky removed all the hidden text from his pages now he can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Login to your webmaster tools account under tools click on request reconsideration and follow the steps make sure you explain what you did wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.

Once you have submitted a request you will receive a message from us in the message center confirming that we have received it. We will then review for compliance with the Google webmaster guidelines. So that’s an overview of how to submit a reinclusion and reconsideration request. Thanks for watching and Good luck with web mastering and ranking.

Search engine optimization URL change is it recommended?

Search Engine optimization URL change from static to Dynamic

Many have asked the question what happens if the URL is changed from html to PHP or ASP or vice versa. Well in Search engine optimization URLs shouldnt be changed often. Search engines recognize a page based on the URLs so once they are indexed its not recommended to play with them much. Google assigns pagerank to individual URLs based on backlinks to that page from other pages from the site or from external sites. So if a Url is changed it will affect Search engine optimization. The pagerank of that page is lost and Google also have to drop that page from the index. Also till the page is dropped you need to wait or Google will index the new page with the new URL which will result in lots of confusion happening. Duplicate pages will be created and at times the version you want to have will drop off. So its important to decide which version of urls you want to use whether php or asp or html or htm or what ever decide before you start designing the site. There is no difference between a PHP url and a html URL so if you think in future there will be dynamic contents in the page better name it PHP or ASp or any dynamic extension of the code you want to use.

Ok if you have unavoidable reasons where you want to change the page extensions then make sure the old pages are 301 redirected to the new pages that are created that way you won’t loose the value of the old page. 301 redirect for all coding is available online you can use it.

Best recommendation don’t change URLs unless you have unavoidable reasons. That is the best for Search engine optimization purposes.

BOSS – Build your Own Search Service a step ahead from yahoo

Yahoo recently launched BOSS a new search service which helps to build your own search service.
A web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. It is a new platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. It also allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production searchinfrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences.
SUMMARY:
* Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience.
* Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements.
* BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
* Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon.
* Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day.

USE FOR ITS PARTNERS & YAHOO:Its open up to infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies because boss believes that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success, opening their network, opening their own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening their search infrastructure via BOSS. It will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, there’s a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo!Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, BOSS will be launching a monetization platform that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.

ADVANTAGE FOR ITS USERS: BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide valueto users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations.

FEW EXAMPLES OF WHATS POSSIBLE WITH BOSS:ME.DIUM-Medium is a start-up that’s built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale searchengine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Medium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.

HAKIA-Its a semantic search start-up, which is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is ableto deliver a language search experience that isn’t available from any of the “big three” search providers or other semantic search engines.

DAYLIFE TO-GO-Its a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. It uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.

CLUUZ-This is a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

To learn more about BOSS and get started using the API, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network. BOSS is open to all. One can check out the documentation, get a BOSS app ID and start building the next generation of search!!

Google introduces webmaster tools access provider program

Webmaster tools Access provider pilot program,

Google has recently come up with a new option in webmaster tools where they enable hosting companies to integrate webmaster tools features into their hosting plans as well their servers. Google has recently read this new technology and it works great.

With the help of Google APIs webmaster tools can be directly integrated in web hosting control panel. For products like Cpanel its very easy to get something like running using webmaster tools hosting programm, Also hosting companies which uses Google webmaster tools will receive a badge which says Google webmaster access provider which will help web hosting providers an other reason to promote their business.

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Yahoo rejects Microsoft icahn proposal –

Reason for denial

“

1. Yahoo!’s existing business plus its recently signed commercial agreement with Google has superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal.

2. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would preclude a potential sale of all of Yahoo! for a full and fair price, including a control premium.

3. The major component of the overall value per share asserted by Microsoft/Icahn would be in Yahoo!’s remaining non-search businesses which would be overseen by Mr. Icahn’s slate of directors, which has virtually no working knowledge of Yahoo!’s businesses.

4. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo! for the up to the one year it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal.”

Board Decision:

“Yahoo! Board’s conclusion that the current proposal is not in the best interests of stockholders is based on a number of factors, including:

— The revenue guarantees suggested, which are conditional and subject to reduction, are well below the search revenue that the Company is expected to generate on its own and in association with its announced commercial agreement with Google. That agreement alone is estimated to generate $250 to $450 million of incremental cash flow for the first twelve months following implementation, while allowing Yahoo! to remain a principal in paid search;

— The success of the remaining Company is critically dependent on Microsoft’s ability to effectively monetize search;

— Microsoft/Icahn’s proposed Traffic Acquisition Costs rates are below market;

— The proposal calls for Yahoo! to sell its industry-leading algorithmic search business and its related strategic and valuable intellectual property portfolio for no incremental consideration; and

— Many of the components of the headline value that Mr. Icahn and Microsoft put forward, such as the spin-off of the Yahoo!’s Asian assets and the return of cash to stockholders, are steps that could be taken by Yahoo! on its own and the Board continues to evaluate these options.

Mr. Bostock concluded, “Microsoft and Mr. Icahn are trying to dismantle the Company and deliver our search business to Microsoft on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. We are prepared to let our stockholders, not Microsoft and Carl Icahn, decide what is in their best interests and we look forward to the upcoming vote.””

Search Engine Optimization Blog Team,

Avoid Sponsoring WordPress theme – Beware of wordpress theme sponsoring

Google has been very tough recently on sponsoring wordpress themes. I know at least one company who actively seeks business to place links on sponsored wordpress themes. I recommend to stay away from those shady tactics. Sponsoring wordpress themes and getting link from the footer is same as buying links there are lot of sites affected by this activity. If Google sees unbalanced links coming to commercial sites from wordpress themes. They will devalue it so there is no point in paying for it. Also there are situations where a site resulted in plus 60 or 950 penalty after sponsoring wordpress themes.

So is it worth to sponsor theme pay for it and finally get banned? I recommend instead of using your resources on tactics like that find innovative ways to make people link to your site. This is 10 times more benefit able than sponsoring themes.

If you develop a word press them you have all the rights to get the necessary credit for it. But if you are using it for commercial gains and manipulate search engine rankings then you should be ready to face the consequences. I recommend stay away from ideas that are hurting search engines badly. Search engines do have a tolerance level but if 1000s of sponsored links are damaging the reputation of results then they will act against it.

vijay,

Adwords keyword suggestion tool now shows real numbers

Before it was not the case. We just see a bar estimating the competition and search volume for a particular phrase now we see real numbers. We can estimate traffic for a particular phrase for past month as well as average all time.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I am sure all paid keyword tools will disappear now since google gives their own authoritative data and all other data are just a waste of time now.