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I left the soccer pitch yesterday 11 PM to see an SMS forward from a friend about TechCrunch Twitter alert, Yahoo-Google announcement 1:30 PM today. This is gotta be about the advertising partnership.

And indeed, I woke up today to read about the Google & Yahoo public joint announcement declaring they are going into an advertisement partnership in which Google Ads will be served on Yahoo search results for the queries Yahoo! see as rewarding for them. So Yahoo! is not giving up completely on their advertising program, but if the estimates of $800 million revenue increase in one year turns out to be true, and my senses tell it’s going to be more, I guess they could change their mind about the partial partnership.

The Justice Department ofcourse is still unhappy and are investigating a possible AntiTrust. However, since Yahoo played it smart, and made a non-exclusive advertisement partnership agreement, which means any other bidders may get theirs ads on Yahoo pages as well, then I guess there is no reason for the partnership to be stopped.

How this will affect advertisers is what makes me wonder however. Yahoo! can select the queries it want to have Google Ads for, and stick to their program for others. So how will this happen, for keyword “shopping” for example. There are two sides here:

- I am a Google Advertiser: Will I have the option to show my ads on Yahoo! search results. This could make sense to avoid possible lawsuits, or it could under the Content Network. If it’s an opt-in, the adaptation rate might be a bit slower. Not everyone is always up to date on those changes. Otherwise, it may be an opt-out option, and I doubt people want to do this really.

- I am a Yahoo! Advertiser: I am bidding for the word shopping. Does Yahoo! tell me “Sorry, go join Google and bid for Shopping word”? What if I don’t want to place my ads on Google because of say, click-fraud cases I’ve heard of. And what if not all my words are powered by Google Ads. It means I have to literally manage two advertising programs, who are mutually exclusive in the budget and tracking, to bid for the keywords I want.

I just hope there will be a bit more easier way to do it, and a sort of integration between the two.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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For Firefox users, this is a small hack that I think might come in handy sometimes. Firefox Search Engines support on-the-fly auto-complete, which IE7 as I know doesn’t. This feature however is rarely utilized, but the default Google search engine luckily does use it. It comes pretty useful sometimes, especially when you want to search for something that you don’t know how to spell. Now suppose you want this auto-completion to search for specific product on Amazon rather than Google. You could do that easily without moving your hands off the keyboard as follows:

1. Start with Google as the default search plugin, press Ctrl+K (Move cursor to Search Engine box)
2. Start typing what you are looking for, say “HTC…”. Stop right there and you will see list of suggestions, one of which happens to be what I’m looking for. The “HTC Tytn ii”

   

3. Move with the Down key to the desired result, say “HTC Tytn ii” in our case.

   

4. Click Ctrl+Right key (Select current option). Cursor will move back to search engine box
5. Click Ctrl+Down key (Browse installed search engines) until you reach Amazon Search Engine.
   
6. Enter

That’s it. You can apply this to any other search or search engine you want, without moving your hands off the keyboard.

Popularity: 35% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Google and Yahoo! have been undergoing a testing period for the efficiency of delivering Google Ads alongside Yahoo search results. This is to measure how the ad click-throughs are compared to Yahoo’s own ads. Yahoo themselves estimate that Google Ads bring 60-70% more revenue than Yahoo. This is because of ad relevancy for one, and two I’m sure from the large collection of advertisers Google has. The more options you have, the more possible it is to deliver better results. Also, the user won’t get bored from the same results all the time. And when it comes to global market, say the Arabic region for example, or any other non-English site, it’s pretty difficult to get any geo-targeted ads. I don’t see any Arabic ads at Yahoo or any other ad network, while Google is getting more and more every day.

The test was to show Google ads at 3% of Yahoo search results inside the US for two weeks only. How did it go? Both parties have spoken general good deal of it so far. The Justice Department have been officially informed about the ongoing tests, and questions are rising right now about whether a deal between the two would give Google a monopoly over the internet ad market. Frankly, I would love for my Google Ads to show on Yahoo results for two reasons. One, Google is the best advertising program I’ve tried from many others, and gives very strong ad control and tracking. Two, I don’t want to split my money and time following multiple ad programs. Still however, for a multi-billion dollar business that large, I believe Google are over looking certain areas and need to improve on them:

• Ad Filtering: Filter unwanted ads on my site. Sex & gambling mainly. Google does a brilliant job catching fraud ads, ads that do not reflect the site content, heck they even ban certain Arabic words if they are about medical terms without valid permit. I’ve had one keyword disabled “عقار” which means both real-estate and medicine. It was banned because it’s a medical term and I can’t promote medical stuff without any proof of permit, even if I really meant real estate. So their filtering is strong when they want to, yet their Google AdSense competitive ad filtering is pretty lousy. I filter a certain site and after 12 hours I can still see the ads showing up on my site. This could be really embarrassing and bad for a business. I also don’t get any chance to disallow gambling and sex sites, which I believe should be a normal easy to implement option. Google already offers to filter offensive content in it’s search, so an option to disallow those sites from advertising on mine should be pretty simple.
• Customer Support: How easy is it to contact Google for support? And how long does it take for them to reply. Not what you hope for from a leading company. Google support has always been disappointing to me.
• Wire-Transfer: For AdSense, most countries are still not supported for money transfer. Many smaller sites are ahead of Google and transfer to any place in the world. Google is only slowly expanding, and yet promoting the green environment thing.
• Money Split: For some reason Google just don’t wish to tell you how much your share is from the click. Many other sites do. The ad is on my site and we are sharing the revenue. Any business would usually include share percentage. Google always gives vague unclear answers about the subject. If it’s bad, then you’re doing EVIL. If it’s good, then say it. One report was published before by New York Times based on announced 2006 Google financial reports estimating 78.5% of the AdSense clicks going to the publishers. Such a big number makes you wonder why wouldn’t Google reveal it. One reason I can think of is maybe they don’t want competitors to know the percentage and start a percentage share war.

All in all, Google remains a very strong source for advertising and revenue that I would like to see expand further. A bit more attention is required hoewever for customer needs.

Popularity: 36% [?]

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IMG ALT attribute is an alternative text that is displayed to the user when the image is not found, giving the user a hint about what the image is. Typical example would go as this:

<img src=”/images/google-logo.jpg” alt=”Google logo” />

In most cases, you normally expect that the image will be shown rather than alternative text, and if you do have so many broken image links, then most likely the alternative text is not going to help you a lot attract many visitors anyways. That said however does not mean one should overlook the alt attribute at all, on the contrary. IMG ALT attribute is used by search engines like Google and Yahoo when indexing for images. The alt attribute is one very strong hint about the content of the image, and proper labeling would sure help the search engine return your images as relevant results to the users, and ofcourse, increase your site traffic.

Having followed that, and taking a look at Q8Ba7th site traffic, I found that over 3% of the total site traffic is coming from image searches, and not any image searches, but rather Google Image searches.

Two nice rules to follow for Image SEO are:

1. Image Names: Meaningful “-” separated file names, e.g. “Google-logo.jpg”
2. ALT Attributes: Short, meaningful and related, like alt=”Google logo”

Following such practices helps you get traffic, and the user get the desired images. Oh, and it also makes the job of the search engine a whole lot easier.

UPDATE: 3baid mentioned below the title attribute, which is used to give image description usually that the user sees when pointing his mouse over. It is also used for Image SEO, and while Google seems to be fine with one of them only, it’s probably a good idea for me as well to use both, as some other engines may use only one. I will need to look into how they treat it as spam. Video below posted on how Google treat the IMG attributes.

Popularity: 24% [?]

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Google, the company which started 10 years ago as a Phd project, moved into a garage for a while, and then 6 years later went on public offering, turning half of it’s employees into millionaires over night. The company which was chosen as the strongest brand in the US, and best place to work for last year. That same company for the first time is not living it’s glory days from the start of this year, following several events:

• Two executives and several other employees moving from Google to Facebook, just as Google did to Microsoft in the past.
• Their stock price have gone down below the $450, after it was $700 3 months back. (This could be a right time to buy if you strongly believe in them. Most Analyst still do)
• For the first 3 months in a raw, according to comScore, the number of Google sponsored Ads clicks is declining. This ofcourse is Google’s main stream of revenue, that is feeding everything else. So if that goes down, well, Good bye Gmail, Google Reader, and all other great Google services.
• Decline of search volume on Google last month. Even though February was shorter than Jan by two days, and all other search engine volumes went down, in fact Google was the least declining from top search engines, analysts still think there is a decline in the amount of search done on the web. Why is that? Social networks? Blogs? Feeds? No answer yet.
• Rise of new search engines. Now I know not every new search engine is a threat, in fact most aren’t. And the reason is that, it’s difficult to convince Googlers why your search algorithm is better. You need to find another way to draw their attention. Two new comers actually did and have been turning some heads on the web. One of them is Mahalo, the human-powered search engine. It’s still new, has lots of missing content. I mean, they don’t have pages for Arsenal F.C. nor Monkey Island (turns out they do now :). Where are you Arsenal and Monkey Island geeks! Well, Arsenal might have enough problems right now, but MI fans, quit playing S&M and do some stuff :). Anyways, I was impressed by the spam-free form of it, and the rich content you can find there for items that do have some content filled up. You can go the their main page and browse from their to the hot topics and results on the web. The other search engine that will draw some market-share I guess if they keep going straight is Searchme. The engine is still in private beta, invitation only (except this very moment, they have limited instant accounts, currently 970 left). What’s unique about this engine is the way you browse the results. Instead of getting text based results, clicking a link, waiting for the page to load only to realize it’s spam or useless page, here you browse images of the page instead of text only. So before clicking on any link, you have an idea about how the site looks like and what you could find there. It’s actually pretty similar in nature to browsing file thumbnails on Apple Finder. The engine is flash based and I assume people with low resources and connection will not find it most useful. I was personally very impressed however from how it works, and am looking forward to more from it.

So what now. Is Google going to die? I don’t really think so, but their growth I presume is not going to be the same as last year. I personally don’t agree with what ex-Google employee said after joining Facebook, that social networks are “Google of yesterday, and Microsoft of the past”. You will always need a search engine (or alternative) to reach your information, and a social-network is not the one ofcourse. Also, social-networks are more like bubbles than any other. People follow the hype, join their friends, want to have fun in new ways. Then suddenly, a new social-network comes with new fancy way of doing stuff. People will start jumping there, and the net-worth of the company will run fast down. Especially when their current social-network is controlling too much sensitive information and keeps abusing it. The other point is what some analyst said. People in social-networks are mostly after entertainment and socializing with their friends, and they are less likely to be interested in some ad on the side. On the other side, people are more likely to click on related ads when they are actually searching for that specific topic. After all, it could be what they need. But it all depends on the quality of the link, which Google’s been trying to push for real hard.

Popularity: 34% [?]

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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This tale of this day could really be told for decades to come. It could be a day that will change the web dramatically, with Yahoo Board of Directors setting today on one table to discuss and decide on the Microsoft $44.6 billion bid to acquire Yahoo. Such an acquisition I believe has never happened before in the web. One of top 3 sites acquiring the other. Shall Yahoo decline the offer, Google would be happy to offer all the help their competitors need to get back on their foot, starting with powering their Search (again), and their Search Marketing expectedly.

Google hasn’t been looking at this only however, rumors are spreading about acquisitions of two social-networking sites, namely Bebo and Plaxo. Meanwhile, Ask.com keeps their steady silent enhancement with their Big News release, which is really appealing, and is aided with some video, picture, and Digged news.

UPDATE: Yahoo! says we are worth at least $56.4 billion ($40/share) if Microsoft is interested. While Yahoo! doubts Microsoft would bow to such claim, the door is still open for Microsoft, and this time with a certain target. I don’t think this is the end of it, but I believe meanwhile Google are gonna boast things with their rival in a joint venture, just to show Yahoo! how good it will taste.

Popularity: 24% [?]

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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During the building of Q8Ba7th direcotory of Kuwaiti sites, I have noticed an enormous number of sites using Flash as their intro page, with or without a real good reason. Flash is just used because it looks cool. People don’t take in mind what message they want to convey to their users, or what their users really want from visiting the site. Many government sites have even some long and heavy flashy intro pages, and the misery rise when there is no link to bypass it. Flash is a real cool technology to insert animation and present demos online. But intro pages were just cool the old days, and no one will visit your site back for some fancy flash you made (or taken from somewhere else). When designing a site, there are many things to keep into consideration, and Flash intro pages should be avoided in most cases for the following reasons:

• Load time: Flash sites take long to load, wasting user time and bandwidth.
• Bad Experience: The faster and easier I can make use of site visit, the more I am likely to visit it again.
• SEO Effect: Flash components are non-indexable by search engines. A front page is the first page a search engine usually sees, and if that page has no indexable content, then the search engine may not bother (or be able) to index the rest of the site. It’s kind of locking the front door from visitors. Ofcourse, search results are one of the great free ways to generate huge amount of traffic, and leaving that portion of traffic means you have to rely on ads and word of mouth mostly.
• Flash Support: This is a very low rate I know, but still some browsers and users don’t have Flash running, and you would be denying them access to your site.
• Meaningless: Very often, the Flash is simply a moving animation of site name and some text, not sending any message to the visitor. A government does not need promotion it self at all. It’s an official site. One of a kind in each country. Zero competition. Just deliver the content and services the user want. He will come back trust me on that one.

Some may argue they really really need a Flash intro site, or their whole site is Flash based. What to do in that case?

• Have some meaningful title and meta content on the intro page.
• Always always have a text based Skip Intro link. Leave it outside the Flash. That way, you are giving the customer a quick way to skip the Flash and go inside the site, not having to wait for any Flash load. And, you are also giving search engines an entrance point to the rest of your site, making it indexable.
• Try to deliver some side content around the Flash as well. See Snap for instance.
• Provide Flash  Alternative: If Flash is not supported, provide text based version of the site.
• Flash size: Be considerant to the Flash size as this is the first page the visitor sees, and if it takes long, it may be his last. If you can’t avoid large Flash size, then be sure to have progressive loading. Give something to the user as long as it’s ready. This makes the loading transient for him.
• Modifiable: Many Flash are just designed or one time and no thought of future modification was ever made. If there is a slight chance this would need to change in the future, try to accommodate for it ahead of time.

Popularity: 43% [?]

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