Search Engine Optimization News Blog

In an unprecedented move, a major news source is planning to completely turn its back on the internet instead of attempting to grow with the times.

Rupert Murdoch is planning to launch a paid content strategy sometime next year and in a recent Sky News interview he announced that Google would be blocked from the site:

Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.

This apparently in response to Google’s disagreements with them over links to content; Josh Cohen, a Google Senior Business Product Manager wrote on the Google European Public Policy Blog that news publishers:

“like all other content owners, are in complete control when it comes not only to what content they make available on the web, but also who can access it and at what price.. for more than a decade, search engines have routinely checked for permissions before fetching pages from a web site. Millions of webmasters around the world, including news publishers, use a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or even just a particular web page, can be crawled. Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use..two lines to deny permission.”

Murdoch and several other news sources claim Google is nothing more than a scraper site, and that the snippets posted with a link in Google News are preventing readers from paying for their content. Whether an online publication can actually support itself without Google remains to be seen.

Google has arranged to deliver more targeted ads by acquiring Teracent, a company that took intelligent display advertising to a new level. According to the Google blog:

Teracent’s technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns. In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content.

We’re looking forward to welcoming the Teracent team to Google and to making this technology available to our display advertising clients — including those who run display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network and our DoubleClick clients.

According to Teracent:

We are excited to announce that Teracent has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google. The infrastructure, opportunities and technical depth that Google will provide for Teracent customers means a future of product innovation for Teracent’s dynamic ad optimization platform. The transaction is subject to various closing conditions and is expected to close this quarter. Integration details will follow after close, and, in the meantime, please expect the same great Teracent performance and service as always. We are excited to finish this year on a high note for all our customers and partners and ring in an even more exciting 2010!

Teracent already was working with Yahoo on their mobile ads:

Teracent, in partnership with Yahoo!^®, offers advertisers a new platform to target customers when they are away from their PC. Now through Yahoo!’s mobile SmartAds program, you can deliver highly customized and targeted messages to Yahoo!’s 25.9 MM+ on-the-go Mobile audience, according to ComScore).

Mobile SmartAds enable advertisers to customize creative to individual users in real-time with dynamically optimized ads based on user demographic and interest-based data, as well as factors such as location, time of day — even the local weather! Your campaigns are constantly updated with the most relevant message to help you connect to in-market shoppers with the right offer at the right time.

The main idea behind intelligent display is the ability to more tightly target ads to text – for example, an article about fencing would show and ad for fence posts or panels instead of a generic home improvement store ad.

Professional writers know one golden rule – never, ever, start an article with “According to Wikipedia…”. Apparently a lot of web folks haven’t figured that out yet.

A post by Andrew Gelman at Columbia.edu was talking about a new informational knowledge type site called Sourcewatch, that had a Wikipedia appearance, and stated:

…for  better or worse, Wikipedia is generally considered to be authoritative.

But then I was thinking . . . is this the beginning of the end for Wikipedia. I don’t know anything about Sourcewatch, if they’re good guys or bad guys or whatever–but if they can mimic Wikipedia, I’m sure lots of other organizations could do so too. And, when they do it, all of a sudden there will be a lot of authoritative-looking Wikipedia-like pages floating around, a sort of counterfeit money devaluing the “real” ‘pedia, which will then have to respond by branding itself–”100% real Wikipedia, accept no imitations”–and so on. Not a bad thing, perhaps, but not what we have now.

A few phrases jump out at me.

for  better or worse, Wikipedia is generally considered to be authoritative.

Ahh…. NOT. Write for any reputable publication on or offline, and Wikipedia is the first thing they tell you to avoid. Then there’s this:

there will be a lot of authoritative-looking Wikipedia-like pages floating around, a sort of counterfeit money devaluing the “real” ‘pedia

Again – funny, considering that Wikipedia isn’t really considered an authority source at all – or at least not by people who matter in the content business.

Of course there is some good stuff on Wikipedia, but calling it an authority is a bit more than a stretch. I’ll never quote it, and I’ll definitely not start or end with it when researching.

Is Sunnyvale no longer going to be the Yahoo HQ? According to the Mercury News:

Yahoo is moving forward with plans to build a new campus that would house as many as 12,000 workers in Santa Clara, potentially the largest single real estate development in the city’s history.

The total complex would include about 3 million square feet of office space, featuring 13 six-story buildings constructed over a large underground parking garage, according to a draft Environmental Impact Report released this week for public review.

“It’s enough to make you yell, Yahoo!” said Santa Clara Vice Mayor Jamie Matthews. “To have such a massive future expansion in your city’s future is a tremendous gift to all of Silicon Valley.”

Yahoo spokesperson Dana Lengkeek told the paper:

“We’re going through this development process and we can’t really say at this point we’re going to do X,Y or Z because that might impact the approval process.”

This news seems to definitely point to big plans in Yahoo’s future, despite skepticism from many who felt that the rocky past two years and subsequent deal with Google indicated that yahoo was rolling over.

Although apparently the DOJ is still on the fence, those north of the border as well as down under feel that Microsoft / Google partnership is a good idea.

Although the DOJ has not yet signed off on the deal and the two search ginats keep begging for more time to iron out details, the governments of Canada and Australia have already approved of the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) published findings saying that “the proposed agreement was unlikely to result in a substantial lessening of competition.” The ACCC said Microsoft is already using Yahoo’s paid search platform in Australia, and says that the two companies’ “share of online paid search advertising queries in Australia was limited.”

Looks like the Aussies don’t really care if Google cuts our Microsoft’s Bing or not. Of course, the UK loves Google, and Aussie still march to the Beefeater;’s drum more often than not.

The Canadian Competition Bureau has apparently notified both Yahoo and Microsoft that it won’t oppose the agreement, although a formal release of their findings is still pending. The two companies issued a joint statement today which says, in part, “We continue to believe that this deal will create a true, competitive alternative in the marketplace that will benefit consumers, advertisers and publishers. We remain hopeful that the agreement will close in early 2010.”

Now if Google can just iron out their problems in Europe, where Germany, Italy and France still resist them strongly due to privacy concerns, then Google may indeed achieve world domination.