SEO News Blog

Google just released their fourth quarter earnings for the year 2006 with a marked increase of 19% over the previous quarter. The total of $3.21 billion earnings by Google just goes to show that Google is moving in the right direction.

Top Earners For Google

Google site revenues had 62% of the earnings and Google Network Revenues had 37% of the total. This combination seems to be pushing Google ahead and may prove to be it’s makers or breakers.

Deal Makers Or Breakers For 2007

So what’s going to stop or increase revenues even more for Google in 2007? If I had to guess I’d say Employee Transferable Stock Options were to be the biggest deciding factor. Even Google admits that when this is introduced in the second quarter of 2007 it’ll increase it’s revenues by $90 million. If this program panics stock holders when it fails it may bring down Google as we know it. But on the other hand if it goes as expected it’ll boost it considerably.

Another factor would be how Google is going to be how Google handles it’s search engine. The folks over at Google need to keep in mind that the search engine drives everything else. Recently with criticism from even the Firefox creator about it’s ads on SERPs. Not to mention it’s hardcore advertising of Google Checkout, it’s newest service.

In summary I think Google needs to recognize its basics and stand by its motto (don’t be evil) and it’ll do just fine.

Thank You

Yahoo just announced new features for their site explorer service. Basically the same idea behind Google webmaster central except it’s a little bit slow on progress in terms of features. So you can understand how these new features like authenticating your website via a meta tag and Link Count badge are important.

Yahoo Site Explorer: This new ability to able to authenticate that you own a website via a META tag copies Google Webmaster Central’ s tool. Before you could authenticate your website via uploading a file. Now it’s both this will help freely hosted websites like Blogger or Wordpress.com blogs get their blogs verified. This also with better reporting of the errors encountered during the authentication. I am writing this as I am authenticating several of my Blogger blogs myself.

Site Explorer Link Count Badge: Officially called the Site Explorer Badge it is an original idea by Yahoo to give users the ability to display how many links they have on their website. This link count is taken straight out of the Site Explorer.

Delete URLs: You can delete your URL from the Yahoo Site Explorer and it will be deleted from Yahoo’s index. Though easily achieved through the robots.txt file this is an easier way to get your website removed from the Yahoo index fast.

The Rest Of The New Yahoo Site Explorer Features:

• More than 25 sitemaps
• better labeling of TSV files
• Site explorer should identify itself in the user agent string
• https / ssl
• Wait 1 day? (Speed of authentication)

Thank You

Hi, I hope you are having a nice Monday so far and feeling rested from the week-ends. I on the other hand had a very busy week-end but managed to get in a couple of posts here. So here’s your Monday Morning SEO News Roundup:

Predicting Search Queries Before Demand Arrives - SEOMoz

MyBlogLog Integrates Flickr - Mashable

Google MFA and No Way Out! -  Wolf-Howl

Search Personalization Will Not Kill SEO - SEO Book

MySQL, PHP, Apache - Gettign Started Making Websites - Shoemoney

Is Your Google Sitemap Working? - The Blog Herald

Thank You

Amapedia or really just [Ama(zon)-(Wiki)pedia] is Amazon’s answer to the web’s continuing turn to user content. Any web user can tell that ordinary website reviews are boring and for the most part go unread by the intended users. But with an ambitious service like Amapedia it should serve to gain as much popularity as Wikipedia itself.

Like Google Amazon is learning to use trends to it’s own advantage. From it’s new answers service and it’s mobile phone version called NowNow Amazon is moving in as another web giant.

This beta has few new things mostly the ability of anyone with an Amazon user account to edit it. Other features include the tagging of said products and facts about them.   As well as marking your favorite items. They didn’t waste anytime of course coming up with rules from the Amapedia about page:

Do:

1. write about your favorite products
2. find out what others’ favorite products are
3. quantify why you like or dislike a product as much as possible (”oh, I didn’t like it” without any context is not very helpful to others)
   
4. cite your sources
   
5. disclose if you are affiliated with the product, such as being the author of a book (or the spouse or close friend of the author)

Do Not:

1. self-promote by referring to yourself, your work, or your Web sites in an article that is unrelated to your self-promotion
2. store personal photos
3. create a personal home page (we may support that in the future)
4. talk in the first person in the main body of product articles (that’s what the “Anecdotes, Experiences, Opinions, Comments” section is for)
5. express personal opinions about things that are not products (i.e., while we are very interested in your opinion about a book about the Iraq war –  particularly so if you can calmly document specific good and bad points about it –  we are not at all interested in your personal opinions about the Iraq war itself on this site)
6. accept payments or gifts from anyone to edit material on amapedia

So far it seems to be progressing slowly but on a good scale.

Thank You

Google released their new Image search a couple of days ago and I couldn’t help but notice it looked familiar. And then I went over at MSN Live and searched “search engine” and guess my surprise when the results looked just about identical to Google’s new search.

As you can see for yourself it’s another rip off from the folks over at Google. Just as the Yahoo IE7 download page was ripped off when it first came out. One has to wonder if Google still has any creativity left in it’s banks.

Thank You