Legal Search Marketing Blog

Yahoo and Microsoft Search Deal Finally Announced

Yahoo and Microsoft have finally announced their search deal, after years of negotiation. In short, if the deal is approved by regulators, Yahoo Search will be powered by Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft adCenter.

This will not happen right away, best case the deal will be complete in early 2010, the longest it can take for full implementation is two years. The integration will begin in the United States with search and then with search ads. The integration will then expand to other countries and regions.

The search brand at Yahoo will remain to be "Yahoo Search" but it will have a label at the bottom of the page that says "Powered by Bing." Nothing is changing now, not until they get regulatory approval, and then when they get that approval, they will begin pushing out the integration. So you have time to prepare your site.

BACKGROUND ON DEAL

*  The term of the agreement is 10 years

* 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

* Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

* 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.

* Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.

* 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.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Optimizing for BING will become more important

Since Bing will be the one powering the search results and now having a bigger share of the search market, it will make sense to make sure your pages are well ranked with Bing. I will certainly be doing more work to provide insight into how Bing ranks results and where it differs substantively from Google. A nice tool to see how Google and Bing results differ is available at the Bing vs. Google search tool.  

Yahoo and Bing LOCAL will become more important

In general Local SEO is becoming more important but with Bing serving up local listings in the search results (as they do now), Bing's local registration is going to become very important for local businesses and law firms. Check out Bing Local and their local listing center.

This overall deal seems to be better for Microsoft then Yahoo, Yahoo seems to just be quitting the search engine game and just leaving it up to Microsoft and Bing. I will say that BING has proven to be a very good search tool for me and they seem to be serious about competing here, we will see what happens but remember its still possibly 2 years away before this actually goes into place.

Reports: Yahoo & Microsoft Very Close On Search Deal

There are several reports tonight that Yahoo and Microsoft are close to consummating a search and advertising deal. 24/7 Wall Street cites an investment banker who says a deal is “imminent.” All Things Digital says an agreement is “down to the short strokes,” but also points out that the companies have been down this road before.

Both reports speculate that the deal will include a large upfront payment to Yahoo — the “boatloads of money” that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has said a deal would require — and additional future payments in exchange for Microsoft taking over Yahoo’s search and search advertising business. 24/7 Wall Street cites sources who say Yahoo will get $3 billion upfront.

All Things Digital reports that several high-level Microsoft executives, including Yusuf Mehdi, Satya Nadella, and Dr. Qi Lu, were in the Silicon Valley on Thursday to try closing the deal. Their source also says that this is the end of the road for the long-running talks between Microsoft and Yahoo, and if no deal is reached “we will all finally go our separate ways and be done with it.”

MSN is really being aggressive here and it would be something if they did work out this deal.

Source

Steve Ballmer Sees Traditional Media As Dead Men Walking

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sees traditional media as a dying advertising medium and that digital content will be the cause of their demise within 10 years.

Speaking at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, Ballmer said the global advertising economy is moving to the digital space and that traditional media that does not move to the opportunities will be left behind, the UK Guardian reported.

"There won't be [only traditional] newspapers, magazines and TV programmes. There won't be [only] personal, social communications offline and separate. In 10 years it will all be online. Static content won't cut it in the future," he added.

"For media businesses to successfully evolve they must provide the right combination of context and relevance to make a compelling online proposition for consumers, according to Ballmer," the online newspaper reported.

WOW that's a real wake up call for anyone in traditional media.   No doubt though he is correct.

source

Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter

The web is full of duplicate content. Search engines try to index and display the original or “canonical” version. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking.

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.

Multiple URLs, one page

Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page. This can come up for lots of reasons. An ecommerce site might allow various sort orders for a page (by lowest price, highest rated…), the marketing department might want tracking codes added to URLs for analytics. You could end up with 100 pages, but 10 URLs for each page. Suddenly search engines have to sort  through 1,000 URLs.

This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.

• Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
• Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value  the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

Using the new canonical tag

Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

That’s it!

• You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
• You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.

This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.

• Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
• Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.

Canonical URL best practices

The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use  it if the URLs use best practices, such as:

• The  content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
• The canonical URL is the shortest version
• The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)

Can this be abused by spammers? They might try, but Matt Cutts of Google told me that the same safeguards that prevent abuse by other methods (such as redirects) are in place here as well, and that Google  reserves the right to take action on sites that are using the tag to manipulate search engines and violate search engine guidelines.

For instance, this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.

If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.

The tag in action

This tag will most often be useful in the case of multiple URLs pointing at the same page, but might also be used when multiple versions of a page exist. For instance, wikia.com is using the tag for previous revisions of a page. Both http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=4901&oldid=4819 and http://watchmen.wikia.com/index.php?title=Comedian%27s_badge&diff=5401&oldid=4901reference the latest version of the article (http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Comedian%27s_badge) as the canonical.

The search engines stress that it’s still important to build good URL structure and also note that if you aren’t able to implement this tag, they’ll still keep the processes they have now to determine the canonical. For instance, at SMX West on Tuesday, Maile Ohye of Google explained how Google can detect patterns in URLs if they use standard parameters. For instance, with these URLs:

• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=evil
• http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike&sort=good

Maile explained that Google can detect (particularly when looking at patterns across the site) that the sort parameter may order the page differently, but that the URLs with the sort parameter display the same  content as the shorter URL (http://www.example.com/buffy?cat=spike).

While it’s rare for the search engines to join forces, this isn’t the first time they’ve come together on a standard. In November 2006, they came together to support sitemaps.org. And in June 2008 they announced a standard set of robots.txt directives. Matt Cutts of Google and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft told me that they want to help reduce the clutter on the web, and make things easier for searchers as well as site owners.

This new tag won’t completely solve duplicate issues on the web, but it should help make things quite a bit easier particuarly for ecommerce sites, who likely need all the help they can get in the current economic conditions. Site owners have been asking for help with these issues for a really long time so this should be a greatly welcomed addition.

source: Search Engine Land

How To Get 8 Out Of 10 TOP 10 Rankings at MSN

Getting top 10 search engine rankings is the goal of most search engine optimization projects.  It makes sense that if your in the top 10 for a keyword related to your firms practice, that you will get some traffic from people looking for the type of law you practice. How about if you were able to get ALL TOP 10 rankings for certain keywords!!!

Ive got one client who has a number of different sites including many mini sites that are focused on specific practice areas such as corporate law, tax law, litigation, estate planning and others and most all of them are listed pretty well in the organic search listings.

At MSN for the keyphrase Chicago Tax Law the firm has the first 7 spots and then also the 10th place for a dominating 8 out of 10 top 10 rankings!   Its harder to achieve that at Google BUT they do have 3 out of the top 10. 5 out 10 at Yahoo.

Having multiple sites can be a very good idea and a way to focus on different sets of keywords. Yet its important though to not just repeat the same content on multiple sites, you must have unique content in order to have success. The more unique content, the better, content is and always will be King!

MSN adCenter Update Coming Soon

A new release of the MSN Pay Per Click adcenter is planned for 4 to 6 weeks, but you can play with it today at the adCenter Beta site.

Here is a summary of some of the new features:

1. Cross campaign keyword search: This is a cool feature where you can search for a phrase at a global level, and adCenter will return all the keywords that use that phrase on a single screen. You can then work on and edit those keywords without having to go in an out of the different individual campaigns.
   
2. Pop-up help: Pop-up help will appear next to any item you have questions you have on a topic by hovering over a question mark icon on the screen.
   
3. adCenter now supports Firefox: A great improvement for those of us who use Firefox almost exclusively.
   
4. Expanded Bulk Upload Capabilities: Bulk uploads can now be done at an individual campaign level.
   
5. Tagging and Favorites: If you have a campaign or a set of keywords that need more management than others, these can be tagged so they will automatically show up and be accisble from your initial login screen.
   
6. Breadcrumbing: This is a neat new feature that allows you to hover over the breadcrum bar, and then see a list of peer web pages in a drop down list right there. So if you are in a particular campaign, and want to navigate directly to another campaign, you can do that quite easily.
   
7. New negative keyword management options: Negative keywords can now be specified at the campaign level

Overall some good improvements in adCenter's usability and functionality.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch

Microsoft Shares Fall Due To MSN Search Performance

TheStreet.com reports that Microsoft's share fell as much as 13% today due to Microsoft's search engine, MSN Search. Microsoft was not prepared for "the rising cost of competing with the better-positioned Net players, notably Google," TheStreet.com reports.

Bloomberg reports that Microsoft may be "investing too much at the expense of profit" in MSN Internet properties, $2.4 billion more, to be exact. TheStreet.com says that MSN Search's search revenues were down in the first quarter and that they expect MSN Search to "lose advertising share" in the 2006 calendar year.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch

MicroSoft Gets a Chunk of Coal for Christmas, Google Extends AOL Partnership

Reuters reports that Google will renew its partnership with AOL and that MSN is out.

Time Warner Inc. is in exclusive talks with Web search leader Google Inc. about broadening a partnership with Time Warner's AOL online unit, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Microsoft Corp., once considered the front-runner for a deal with AOL, is -- at least for now -- out of the running.

Report: Microsoft-AOL Close To Deal

Report from CNNMoney.com that AOL and Microsoft are close to hammering out an online advertising alliance to challenge Google. MSN would replace Google's search results on AOL.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that under the deal now being discussed, Time Warner's America Online unit would switch to using Micosoft's search engine, and the two companies would set up a joint venture to sell online advertising across both AOL and Microsoft's MSN portal.

The newspaper reports that Google is still involved in talks about the possibility of its own alliance with AOL, although a person familiar with the talks told the newspaper a sticking point so far has been Google's reluctance to guarantee Time Warner a minimum amount of revenue, which Microsoft had agreed to do.

FULL STORY: CNN NEWS

Bill Gates: MSN Search Will Soon "More than Match" Google in Terms of Relevance

Post from the Search Engine Watch Blog about Bill Gates predicting that MSN Search will pass Google in terms of relevance:

In an interview with Information Week, Bill Gates talks about Microsoft Research and speaks briefly about search and of course mentions a competitor that begins with the letter "G". Gates says that coming soon MSN will have "more than matched" Google in terms relevance. Here's the full passage:

Gates says:

Search is an amazing example where we relied somewhat on an outside company, Inktomi, which Yahoo bought, then decided to build our own search effort essentially from scratch. Now, in a very short period of time, we will actually have more than matched the kind of relevance that Google can deliver. The role of Microsoft Research in that has been phenomenal.