Archive for category MSN and LIVE

Do search engines trust your website?

Five years ago, Yahoo engineers wrote about TrustRank, an algorithm used to fight spam in the search results. TrustRank works in such way that it semi-automatically separates trustworthy and good quality pages from spam.

Spam-pages get higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results and today any professional SEO optimizers, Google or any other search engine uses Trust Rank or similar techniques against spam. Read the rest of this entry »

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Internet consumer trends in Scandinavia

At Nordic eMarketing, one of our big goals right now is help even more companies to increase and strengthen their presence on the Scandinavian markets. We are therefore really excited about the latest report on digital media consumer behavior and trends in the Nordic and Baltic countries, from one of Scandinavia’s largest telecom providers, Telia Sonera.

The report divides digital media consumers up into four different categories, “tech parents”, “iToddlers”, “infomaniacs” and “IT high society”. The latest group is defined as the most important and influential one. The report even appoints the “IT high society” as the new “upper class” of digital media consumers.

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Google announces a “Flash indexing algorithm”

Finally I must say, now that Adobe has made Flash indexable Google launches their Flash indexing algorithm. As most SEO people know the big problem with Flash-based websites has been that they could not be properly indexed by the likes of Google and Yahoo. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences and now they can be indexed by Google, now let’s see what Yahoo and MSN do.

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Is Microsoft testing Live Search?

It seems that Microsoft is testing Live Search. I have seen tens of visits to sites directly from “65.55.109.191 (microsoft.com)”, their headquaters in Washington DC – “us , WA, Washington”. This blog has had 8 visits from Microsoft under the search terms “search” and “Google”, here is a sample. These are all new visitors, that means that they are either clearing their cookie or there many testers running these test at the same time. All the testers seam to be using IE7 and 800 x 600 screen resolution.

What also stands out is that most of the time they are not coming to the same landing pages at this blog, I have counted eight so far, what is also something to consider is that when I try to search for the same words I can’t see anything from Optimizer Your Web.

I have gotten calls, over the past days, from clients wondering the same thing, why is Microsoft coming in so often? These search also seem to have it in common that they are nearly all single word searches. This has happened with my clients in the UK, France, Denmark, Iceland and the US.

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Is Microsoft Adcenter converting better than Google in Paid Search?

A recent study IndexTools has reinforced Microsoft’s claim that their paid search product converts much better than Google’s across a broad range of search verticals. The study was not a small one either, covering over 15 Million visitors from paid search, Indextools found that Microsoft Adcenter adverts converted into sales around 20% better than Google’s AdWords product.

There is a great article on this at Dixons Jones Receptional News Site.

You can also read about the Paid Search Study at the Visual Revenue site.

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MSN, thanks

Microsoft lauches their Icelandic versions of Live, thanks me like alot!

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Have you seen the adCenter Blog Nostalgia?

Have you seen MSN sumerise 2007, the adCenter Blog Nostalgia? Well here you go! And by reading it I sure got into the New Year party mood, great stuff Mel, Carolyn, Jeanie, Jason & Chris. Looks like the year 2008 is going to be a great one.

One minor pointer, the deep URL’s on you blog, what is up with that? http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!85E824269AB8C30D!616.entry … pweeefffff

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Google up 6% YoY in the US

Google only seams to be getting stronger. While the others have improved greatly, that is MSN, Yahoo and ASK they are just lacking the pull to get some traffic. The results are getting better and better and actually in some tests that I have done I’ve gotten more relevant results on MSN than Google to my search. Google is still the most Iceland friendly search engine, but MSN has the best maps of my country.

According to Hitwise, Google accounted for 64.49 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ended October 27, 2007, while Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com accounted for 21.65 percent, 7.42 percent and 4.76 percent of searches, respectively.

Where will it end?

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Is Wikipedia killing Google?

I ran a cross a great post under the name “Wikipedia dominates organic results at Google” and feel that it’s poster Bob Garcia hits the nail on the head with it. There is a great list of words and phrases that Wikipedia is found as number one in Google’s SERP’s. And my question is exacly the same as Bob´s: How long will Google show Wikipedia the love they don’t seam to show anybody else? Good stuff Bob.

On this topic, I have also seen a huge rise in Wikipedia referrals and Wiki often passes the likes of MSN, Yahoo and ASK as a referrer of traffic. I have done some informal conversion studies with web analytics and they also indicated “a not so bad conversion rate”, no less than from the search engines. So there might be a twist to this all?

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