This week’s SEO news
December 2nd, 2008
This week in the SEO news section, Mo goes through some of the highlights of comScore’s latest metric report, Baidu’s paid ad scandal, the latest addition to Google’s search tools and a piece of search engine related news about Black Friday shopping in the U.S.
Ok let’s start with Baidu, for our very few readers who do not know what Baidu does, it is sufficient to say that Baidu is the Chinese internet giant that runs the most popular search engine and has more users than Google (in China, of course).
It has come to light that four of the major medical advertisers on Baidu did not have valid medical licenses. Baidu took a lot of heat because of this, the stock prices suddenly fell by 60% and the search ad revenue has dropped by approximately 10-15%. Baidu announced that the employees who were involved in this were fired and it is now double-checking all the licenses submitted by medical advertisers. One difference between the way Baidu deals with paid search ads and other search engines is that Baidu lists the paid ads the same way it lists the natural search results. This may soon change.
comScore and Nielsen Online published the search metrics reports
Here are some of the highlights:
According to comScore’s search engine market share in Japan, Yahoo is still a major player in that market. In September, Yahoo beat Google in searches. In September, 5.9 billion searches were conducted in Japan with each searcher conducting an average of 96 searches in that month. Yahoo is leading the market share with more than three billion searches on Yahoo sites which allocate 51.2% of the market share to the company. Google is the runner-up with 2.3 billion searches and 39% market share. As can be seen here, Yahoo and Google are ruling the Japan’s market share with a combined share of more than 90%.
Nielsen published the online search share ranking (global) for October. In terms of year over year (YOY) changes, Yahoo was down 12%, Microsoft was down 19%, and Ask.com took the biggest hit, down 22.9%. Google and AOL got the good news: their number of searches were up 8.1% and 14.5%, respectively. With no surprise, Google is still in the top with total market share of 61.2%, followed by Yahoo with 16.9%.
Google, earlier this month on the inside AdWords blog announced the addition of a new tool called Search-based Keyword Tool. The tool is launched as a beta version like most of Google’s launches.
The tool is meant to help AdWords advertisers find more search terms that are relevant to their landing pages. You can point the tool the potential landing page and the tool will give you a list of relevant keywords to that page. If you are the site owner, there is virtually no limit to the number of results, but if you are not the site owner, the number of suggested keywords is limited to 100 per page. There are good array of filters that can be applied to the results such as:
- Minimum and maximum search volumes
- Competition
- Negative keywords
- Keyword in URL
- Bid price range
This tool can be used to review your competitor’s sites and strategies too. I will try to write another post and give a more in-depth review of the tool soon.
Microsoft’s live search cashback suffered a Blackout on Black Friday
OK, this piece of news might not be so relevant to our UK readers but I thought as it is a search engine related news and also my other colleagues write U.S.-related articles, I would include these few lines to our SEO news section. Most of U.S. searchers are familiar with Microsoft’s Live search cashback program and had plans to save even more using this program on Black Friday sales. The service was reportedly down most of the day on Friday and many customers who purchased products from HP only received a 3% cashback instead of the advertised 40%. I can’t imagine how much of the Geek population was outraged by this, but Microsoft has announced that the affected users can contact Microsoft at: https://support.search.live.com. Sorry, but this URL seems overly generic so I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were one of the ‘affected users’.
Good luck anyways! And happy searching
Mohammad Heidari Far
