Posts Tagged ‘SERPs’

Google Site Blocking Feature – An Assault On SEO?

Friday, March 11th, 2011

During this week’s SMX West conference, Google announced a new feature whereby searchers may block domains from appearing in their search results:

Google Block Domains from Results - Rush Limbaugh

The part of Google’s announcement which grabbed more attention from search engine optimization experts is this statement from the end of the post:

“…while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future…”

I think it entirely likely that Google will (more…)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Domain Names, Google, Usability and User-Experience (UX) | Comments Off on Google Site Blocking Feature – An Assault On SEO?

Monkey See, Monkey Do: Yahoo SearchMonkey Absorbing Into Bing

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Yahoo! SearchMonkeyYahoo notified me a few days ago in an email that their SearchMonkey program is about to undergo a change, with their developer tools, gallery and application preferences set to close down on October 1st.

I wrote a few of the 163 search applications which were officially approved for the gallery:

Yahoo SearchMonkey App for L.L.Bean

Nostalgically, I’m bummed that the application development tools and gallery are going away. The Yahoo! team’s concept of enabling webmasters to have some say in custom-designing their own listings’ appearance in the search results was visionary. Marketers salivated at the prospect, and literally hundreds of people approached them in hopes of getting more influence over the search listings.

Indeed, the enhanced search result listings reportedly got around a 15% higher clickthrough rate, verifying many marketer’s theories that the jazzier listings would attract more attention from searchers, resulting in more conversion activities. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Yahoo | Comments Off on Monkey See, Monkey Do: Yahoo SearchMonkey Absorbing Into Bing

Is it “Game Over” for Internet Yellow Pages SEO?

Monday, July 19th, 2010

In my article on Search Engine Land today, I outline how the recent local SERP testing being conducted by Google has the potential to not only reduce organic traffic to Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) and online directories, but could also freeze out many well-marketed small-to-medium businesses.

So, is it “game over” for IYPs? Should they throw in the towel and move their promotional dollars to other, greener pastures?

IYP SEO - Game Over?

My answer to that is a confident “no!”, and not merely because I do SEO consulting. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Google, Local SEO, Yellow Pages | 3 Comments »