Internet Marketing

Bada-Bing-a-hoo. As crazy as this sounds it is true. MSN or as we now should refer to it as Bing.com has signed a 10-year deal with Yahoo to power its searches for an initial 88% share of search revenue. What does this mean to you? Well if you have ever ranked high with MSN search in the past then get ready to get about 4 times more natural search traffic from this partnership. I have always optimized SEO around Google and have never really gotten much love from Yahoo and have stumbled on great placements on MSN over the years with no real math behind the results.

In a lengthy interview on Friday before departing for a vacation, Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, said she sold the search business because Yahoo could no longer continue to match the level of investment Google and Microsoft were making in searching, one of the Web’s most lucrative and technologically complex businesses.

“My first reaction when I got here was that I wouldn’t even do a search deal,” she said, “until I looked at our expense structure and our actual options and looked at what our prime job was, which is to grow audience.” Yahoo will lose some of its most talented engineers to Microsoft and as many as 400 employees through layoffs. The deal also undercuts years of investment around search technology.

Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies premium search advertisers. Read the below bullet points from the press release. It is a bit lengthy but good information:

• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing Web search platforms;
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology;
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process;
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force;
• Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology;
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites;
• Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88 percent of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first five years of the agreement; and Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country;
• At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million; and
• The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

This announcement could be one of the biggest game changers in the brief history of Internet as we like to call it.

Here is a discount code for the ad:tech San Francisco event 2009 from April 21st – 23rd. If you’re planning on attending, visit the registration page and use the code SFCONF4 for a 40% discount on the conference price. This event is attended by 1,000s of interactive advertising professionals on the buying and selling side of the biz. If you are looking to make contact with an ad network or major portal publisher then you should definitely make the trip down to ad:tech while it is on the West Coast. Visit the official website at: ad:tech

Yahoo! Search Marketing has rolled out new audience targeting capabilities that can help you reach more of the audience you want at the right time and right place. The new demographic targeting, ad scheduling (dayparting), and enhanced ZIP code-level geo-targeting allow you to segment and tailor marketing messages to the audiences that are most valuable to you.

Demographic targeting: You can now select your desired audiences on Yahoo! sites—in both Sponsored Search and Content Match—by age and gender, and automatically adjust your bids when they find a match for your targeting preferences. Demographic targeting uses a new feature bid adjustments, which lets you specify a premium bid amount for desired audience segments, without losing other traffic volume.

Ad scheduling or day parting: If the people you most want to reach are only online at certain times of the day, or your business is only open during certain hours, you can select the time of day and day of the week during which you’d like your campaigns to run. You can schedule ads to be shown according to users’ time zones or your account’s time zone. Ad scheduling can be applied to both Sponsored Search and Content Match, and at the campaign or ad group level.

ZIP code-level geo-targeting: An update to the existing ZIP code-level targeting feature, advertisers now have even more control about how geo-targeting is used. You can mix and match geo-targeting settings at different levels within the same campaign or ad group, and new dynamic mapping features can help you select individual ZIP codes and ZIP codes surrounding them.

Watch this short Audience targeting flash tutorial on Yahoo.

-Brian R.

Google recently published a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide in the Google Webmaster Central Blog due to the high demand of requests from people asking “What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?”. This compact guide is very comprehensive and covers all of the best practices that people can follow to improve their overall crawlability and indexing by the engines. The guide is also available in Spanish and German.

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

From Silicon Alley Insider:

If Google and Yahoo go forward with their search partnership, they’ll have to sign a consent decree. Which will mean, that Google might have US government inspectors digging around in its books, business practices and contracts. The measly Yahoo partnership certainly don’t seem to be worth the government snooping around.

Jessica Vascellaro of the WSJ says Google’s close to walking from the deal. This means Yahoo’s board members might want to get back on the phone with Microsoft about selling the search business to them. The likelihood that Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. will walk away from their planned search partnership has risen, say people close to the contract negotiations.

The two Internet search portals have so far failed to reach an agreement on their partnership with the US Justice Department, which has been building a lawsuit to block the deal. Following a meeting Thursday with the Justice Department, the companies could announce a decision to back away from the partnership — or a last-minute resolution, if one is reached — by the middle of next week, according to these sources.

The option to just scrap the deal has been on the table before, but Google in particular has begun considering it more seriously recently as talks with the Justice Department haven’t progressed. One sticking point has been the Justice Department’s discussion of having the companies sign a consent decree enforcing the terms of the search partnership. By doing so, the parties would be subjecting their compliance with the agreement to ongoing oversight by a judge.

Kara Swisher intelligently guesses what the reason Google gave the WSJ some of this story is to ramp up pressure on the Justice Department to cave. Google doesn’t need this deal, but Yahoo does (and if it doesn’t get it, it’s leverage to draw Microsoft into an alternative deal is very small.)

If that’s the strategy, though, it’s unlikely to work. Who, exactly, is going to complain to the Justice Department about blocking the Google-Yahoo deal? Yahoo shareholders? Not a particularly powerful constituency nowadays.

Related Article: rent a car bulgariaNo Search Deal for Google, Yahoo?
-Brian R.

This has been a confusing topic on what Google’s stance is on trademark and tradename protection. If you do a search for “American Airlines” on Google you will see that Google is now protecting that trade name and even some common mispellings of it. American Airlines doesn’t even have to buy it’s own trade name and it appears top of the natural results as it should. Now do a search for “Match.com” and you’ll see that Match.com has to buy a paid placement ad because there are 5 other competitors bidding on their tradename.

American Airlines settled a law suit in July of this year with Google because they complained that users searching for its trademarked terms can get “confused” and click on a competitors’ ads. Isn’t that what Google’s position has always been since the get go? If you are looking for Coca-Cola then you might also be interested in Pepsi or RC Cola. That should be one of the main functions of a search engine to allow consumers to comparison shop. Don’t you think that if the user puts a branded search in the search box that competitors should be allowed to buy those terms as the user might be looking for related sites especially when it comes to travel.

Now search portals like Yahoo and MSN have been protecting branded terms for quite sometime especially if you have filed your trademarks with them directly which you can do online:

Yahoo Search Marketing Trademark Policy

MSN Trademark Concern Form

What bothers me about Google allowing these large companies to bully them around because of the advertising dollars they spend with them is that the smaller companies with limited legal resources in the meantime get raped on their tradenames from the larger competitors. It is a very unfair environment when the large sites can buy your USPTO registered trademark but you can’t in turn buy theirs. Google has settled similar cases with companies like Geico and American Blind & Wallpaper Factory. I see this being a new trend that will eventually hit Google’s purse pretty hard if everyone starts pushing to protect their names on Google searches. I estimate trade name searches to be in the double digits on Google because consumers will search a name instead of putting it directly in the address bar out of pure convenience. I used to think this was very retarded until I found myself doing the same thing. If you put a .com in the Google toolbar it will automatically take you to the site which basically shows that a ton of people must be doing this too.

-Brian R.

I got a nice surprise message from Google reminding me to vote on Tuesday. Does Google really think they are driving votes by messaging all of their Google AdWords advertisers to vote? I felt spammed for some reason. That space is usually reserved for important messages regarding your account and not for public service announcements.

I wonder if Google will release data on how much they made on this year’s elections from advertisers. At least the people behind each campaign have good ads with strong call to actions on them and best practices applied.

Google has recently taken a stance publicly opposing California’s Prop 8 that seeks to amend the state’s constitution and undo the California Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage, leading co-founder Sergey Brin to release a statement on behalf of Google. “It is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8,” commented Brin, “While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote ‘no’ on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.” I applaud Mr. Brin on showing support to his Gay employees and for supporting same sex marriage rights.

Here is the two political camp’s ads on Google:

Why doesn’t Google allow advertisers to buy “Proper Names”? Proper name searches are one of the most popular searches that people do on search engines right? What are five top things that you do on the internet nowadays?

1. Check your email
2. “Google” someone
3. Read news on how McCain is losing in the polls
4. Check your flailing stocks
5. Facebook (has that become a verb yet?)

That is just my list but is probably true to a certain extent. I think I must Google someone at least once a day and people are always looking for lost friends, loved ones, and classmates. Google a while back made a decision to scrub all paid sponsored listings for any “Proper Name” searches. Why would you turn your back on all of the revenue that could be made from those searches? There must be millions of searches a day on people’s names that Google could be monetizing and they use the excuse that users complained that there were paid ads on their names and that Google was invading their privacy. Couldn’t they just create rules around advertising on “Proper Names” so that they weren’t deceptive or confusing as to what the product offering was?

Just imagine how many advertisers would probably like to advertise for Proper Names such as public record companies, White Pages companies, Reunion, Classmates.com, Friends Reunited, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, LinkedIn.com, ZoomInfo.com, eBay, Amazon, etc.

Just do a search on Google for “Neil Clark Warren“, shouldn’t there be ads for books on Dr. Warren, links to eHarmony.com, etc. Neil Clark Warren is the founder of a very popular online dating service, eHarmony.com. His name alone probably gets searched 1,000′s of times a month for people doing research on his Relationship Compatibility Test.

Now if you do that same search on Yahoo you will see a full marketplace of ads on Neil Clark Warren and guess who is buying an ad? Yup, Amazon.com and a couple other book stores since he is a published author. Is this finally making any sense to you? The only sense I can gather from it is that Google thinks that they should be able to get you all of the information you need on people in their natural search results even though most of the public record information isn’t crawlable content on most websites.

For full disclosure on the topic, I used to work for a public records company that spent a good deal of money on public name searches and when Google made the decision to remove all proper name searches they weren’t too happy. I currently don’t have a client that buys proper names but still to this day can’t understand why they are still not allowing advertisers to buy generic names. Instead, we have to read IMDB and Wikipedia listings on people if they are important enough to have a page created on their name. Come on Google, get with the program dude.

-Brian R.

This is my week to rant about Google so just let me be for a second. I have been doing random searches everyday in areas and verticals that I don’t typically search on just to find some funny search results that don’t make sense or where the SEO pro’s have worked the “Google Algorithm” also referred to my me as “Google Love’s How Popular I Am” tool. We already know Google doesn’t care about your inbound links or your PR link backs or your PageRank score. They get their data from Analytics, Feedburner, links from trusted sources which are usually news publications (Authority links), Registrar info on the age of your site, how active the content is and the list goes on. So what happens when all of your competitors are employing the same tactics to Google? Check the “Nordstrom Coupons” search example below:

Isn’t this reminiscent of how Altavista.com search results used to look back in 1999 before they went under?

Now let’s look at how the search results used to look back in January, 2001 now that Google has published their own ‘way back index machine’ for us to view the Google 2001 results for Nordstrom Coupons:

What has changed in 10 years? Looks like the consumer is getting a pretty shitty experience and where are the ads? Oh, Google doesn’t think that advertisers should be able to buy this keyword I guess because it isn’t relevant even though tons of those same advertisers are now SEOing the hell out of it. This results are starting to look a little homogeneous.

I wish our friends at Mahalo.com would hurry up and get all of their index filled up and start spending some money to get some mind share in search.

-Brian R.

I think that there is huge anti-trust issues with the proposed Yahoo-Google advertising partnership. Google says they will backfill their advertisers into areas where Yahoo doesn’t have any advertisers.

Yahoo President Sue Decker recently wrote on a Yahoo company blog that the nonexclusive Google deal is simply a way of “backfilling” search queries with relevant ads that Yahoo doesn’t have in its network. The idea is that with millions Yahoo users making so many search queries, it is simply not possible for any one company to maintain a large enough repository of ads to make a relevant match with every query. “Not even Google,” she wrote.

As an advertiser and agency that represents several paid search clients we are concerned that Google will apply its muscle to popular terms that they have decided should cost more to advertisers which will raise our costs across the board if we are now buying them from Google via Yahoo.

How could the Department of Justice not see this as anti-trust where Google already commands somewhere around 70 percent of the search market and pairing up with Yahoo will mean that we will be forced to play by their rules and algorithm changes that will favor squeezing more and more out of their already upset advertising community. Google is already exhibiting unfair advertising practices by conveniently protecting large branded searches and letting large brands buy the “trademarked” search terms of their smaller competitors. It is a one-way street where big business is protecting big business and the giant just gets bigger and bigger.

Google has even launched their own “Advocacy” website:
http://www.google.com/yahoogooglefacts/

Doesn’t this look like what you usually see when politicians are sending out slander campaigns against each other. The simple fact is that Yahoo should get their game up and not sell out to Google but maybe team up with Facebook or MSN and try to get some marketshare from Google. Getting in bed with Google at this stage in the game only makes them more powerful on all fronts and reduces Yahoo’s value proposition as a brand. Yahoo is expected to make an additional $800 Million a year from this partnership. Short sighted gain for longer term losses in my eyes. Yahoo, you are bigger than this. Step away from the 800lb. gorilla, roll up your sleeves and make your damn search results better and don’t do it by listing “Wikipedia” at the top of the page like Google and MSN. Try to find a small but popular brand on large search queries in Google and you’ll only see site the large brands, newspaper, .gov links and wiki-sites. (example: travel). Why does Tripadvisor.com have to buy that keyword? Answer that and you might have the answer to what is wrong with Google’s so-called “Algorithm”.

-Brian R.