Over the past few weeks I have been hearing rumors that the Overture Keyword Tool was going to be taken down. This was big news for all the little guys out there that didn’t feel like they needed to pay for a very in-depth keyword research tool. But I found out today that this was simply a rumor. The Overture Keyword Tool is still up and will stay up until Yahoo creates another keyword tool. They are acutally planning on creating this tool and having it available later this year. I’m sure it will be a vastly superior program to the Overture tool, but I wonder if they’ll keep it free.
They did say that there are too many people attempting to access the Overture tool at this time so if you can’t get to it, it’s just because everyone else on the web is using it. Just try again later.
*See the Overture Keyword Tool Here.
My site was cached by Google again on the 24th. It looks like it’s going to happen about once or twice a week. If I continue to post every week day though (which I am fully expecting to do), I think i’ll start to get cached even more frequently than I already am.
Ever heard of a GoogleBomb? If you haven’t yet, you probably never will. And if you have, you won’t hear much of them anymore.
A GoogleBomb is the practice of linking an unflattering or slanderous phrase to a person’s name to make a statement. There are many examples of this, but the one that is the most popular and the one I was shown first was this: If you go to Google and type in “miserable failure” the very first result is (or was) a link to an official George Bush biography page from the white house website.
Google just recently announced that Googlebombs such as this one will now be eliminated by a new algorithm they have created. I can’t even fathom how they are able to do this, but it obviously worked. Now if you type in “miserable failure” there are a bunch of links that talk about George Bush’s page showing up #1 even though it doesn’t anymore.
It sounds like the sole reason Google did this is because there were people who thought that some of these Googlebombs were hand made by Google and reflected their official opinion of the matter. Instead of trying to fight this, Google just fixed the problem altogether.
There are still other ways to slander someone like that, but no more googlebombs.
The biggest news from this weekend revolves around YouTube. They announced that they will be sharing ad revenue with their users - those who create the videos on the site. There is much discussion on whether anyone will make any money doing this, but I beleive that the most popular and widely viewed video’s will acutally make some good profit. This could actually turn into an entirely new industry.
The problems that will arise from this new announcement/feature are endless though, the most prominent one is video spam. Now people are going to try and get their video’s to show up where they shouldn’t just so that they can make some money off of it. It’s definietely going to be a problem, but hopefully YouTube will be able to control it.
It looks like my home page was just cached again by Yahoo yesterday. It’s interesting that Yahoo doesnt tell you when it was cached but I can tell on my site by looking at their cached page of my site and seeing what the last post is. Things seem to be looking up for me already and I only started this website on the 6th of January (new URL and everything).
Today Google announced what their plans were for Google video and YouTube (For anyone who doesn’t know yet, Google acquired YouTube….It was kind of a big thing). They will keep YouTube running as a separate entity and Google Video will soon turn into a very large video search engine - similar to Google’s normal search engine but with video. That means that all of YouTube’s videos will be searchable in Google Video starting today. And plans are that more video’s from many other sites will also be listed in the search index of Google Video.
I think this is an ingenious move by Google. By doing this, they keep the strengths of YouTube and keep the strengths of Google too. From now on, I’ll always go to Google Video to search for videos all over the web.
As of today, SearchBanter has 27 pages indexed in Google, 19 pages in Yahoo and still nothing in MSN. I still have 0 external links indexed in Google, 47 in Yahoo and 7 in MSN. Why does MSN have external links to my site while my site hasn’t even been indexed? Seems a little weird to me. Good ol’ MSN.
So, my homepage was cached again by google on the 18th and today, that just changed to the 20th. It seems like writing a post every day is really helping me to get cached more often by Google. I also creaded a Google sitemap for my site which is probably also helping.
On February 5, 2007, Yahoo Search Marketing is changing the way they determine an ad’s rank in the search results. From then on, both the bid amount AND the ad quality will determine an ad’s rank in the search engine results.
Sounds a bit familiar to me. The “quality index” of the ad is basically the exact same thing that Google Adwords is based on. Yahoo’s Search Marketing interface has also changed to look vaguely familiar to Googles now that it has adwords and adgroups. Personally, I don’t blame them for doing so. Google obviously has created something that works and is user friendly so instead of trying to make something completely different and force your users to learn something new, Yahoo went with what works and what users are already used to. They can perfect it from there.
European Web Analytics provider One Stat conducted some research and found that most people use two or three word phrases when they are querying the search engines. This research was done globally. The breakdown is here:
- Two-word phrases — 28.38 percent
- Three-word phrases — 27.15 percent
- Four-word phrases — 16.42 percent
- One-word phrase — 13.48 percent
- Five-word phrases — 8.03 percent
- Six-word phrases — 3.67 percent
- Seven-word phrases — 1.63 percent
- Eight-word phrases — 0.73 percent
- Nine-word phrases — 0.34 percent
- Ten-word phrases — 0.16 percent
It’s interesting to see that four word phrases are even more popular than one word phrases. To me this says that people are learning how to use the search engines to find the results they are looking for with more accuracy.