26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
A software package that’s similar (only paid) to Firefox’s SEOQuake, described yesterday on Shootout, is SEO SpyGlass. SpyGlass allows you to analyze web pages, including those of your competitors, for factors that produce high search engine rankings. 
MacWorld reports that Yahoo! plans to convert to anonymity the data it keeps on Web searches in three months instead of 13. That will be the least amount of time web search data is identifiable as to individuals among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!
For privacy advocates, “neutering” search data is a big deal. ”Google said in September,” MacWord advises, “that it would anonymize data after nine months, down from 18 months. Microsoft keeps data for 18 months, although it said earlier this month it would reduce the period to six months if its rivals did the same.
“Technology companies have maintained they needed to keep the…
Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide refers us to advice by Greg Myers on SEMGeek.com that a website redesign be tested via paid search. Myers suggests setting a pay-per-click budget aside to test the effectiveness of keywords and other aspects of a site. His piece doesn’t take long to read, and may interest you.
Jeff Cotrupe, Founder and CEO
One of my favorite comedy lines ever, which in this case emanated from the magically twisted mind of Steven Wright, goes like this: “I bought some batteries. But they weren’t included. So I bought ‘em again…I bought some powdered water. But I didn’t know what to add…”
Open letter to Steven and ROW (rest of world): When it comes to websites, I can tell you exactly what to add.
It’s always a good idea to keep your keywords and metatags complete and current on a website; many search engines still key on that when deciding whether to list you in search…
Google is giving a boost to paid search advertisers by giving them a way to determine the terms consumers use to search for their products.
The new Google service is the
Search-based Keyword Tool, just released in the UK and US in beta format. Digital Response Media
reports that the tool “looks at the content of the user’s website to determine the most common search queries for that site. These keywords can then be used by businesses in their paid search engine marketing campaigns or to refine their operations based on popular consumer search trends.”
The new search service is discussed by Google’s Trevor Claiborne in…
