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Hello, I am Serge Thibodeau and I am a search engine optimization expert. My company is Rank for $ales and this is my personal search engine blog. This is where I give my personal comments, some general observations I make about the search industry as a whole, interesting SEO articles and topics that will interest anybody that owns a website and wants it to rank higher in the major search engines. This blog is updated daily and is said to be addictive. Welcome to Serge Thibodeau, Live. |
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Blog archives, week of September 13, 2004505 - September 18, 2004 - 11.36 AM EST FNNIS and eSearch, your next Traffic Power? My friend Bart Wilson over at Voyager 360, whom our long-time newsletter readers know is the man that prepares my SEO radio shows was nice enough to fill me in on the "next Traffic Power scam"... Just when you thought it was 'safe' to navigate the 'SEO waters' again, it's not! If the whole Traffic Power rip off did'nt scare you, this one will! A company that calls itself FNNIS, just launched what it calls 'eSearch', which, in their words is sort of an Internet marketing agency for realtor and real estate company websites. Folks, be on the lookout for FNNIS, especially if you happen to be in the real estate field... According to Bart, Inman news (www.inman.com) carried a story on September 16th about the "launch" of eSearch by FNNIS. It reads: "As further proof that search engines have become real estate "hotspots", Fidelity's (I always thought Fidelity was a mutual fund company!) FNNIS Real Estate division now offers realty agents and brokerages a service to help increase their Web sites' ranking in keyword search results. The service, eSearch Solutions, automates the process of submitting a Web site to 15 major search engines, including Yahoo, MSN, Google, AOL and AskJeeves. Fidelity also submits the site to 8,500 ADDITIONAL SEARCH ENGINES and "special interest directories". (Ed. note- There is no such thing as 8,500 search engines. There are only a handful that are really used by real people). "The technique of keeping a Web site high in search engine's results rankings is known as search engine optimization (!) This, along with paid search, or pay-per-click advertising has attracted a lot of 'buzz' in real estate (!) as more home buyers and sellers begin their home searches online. Search engine portals have been cited as one of the top places consumers go when they log on to the Internet". "If you're not optimized correctly, it can make it difficult or impossible for the search engines to index you," said Todd Wickham, managing director of FNNIS Real Estate. "ESearch Solutions, which launched in May 2004, uses a "proprietary technology" (did'nt you hear that one before?) to maintain a Web site's optimization. The service continually resubmits the Web site to search engines to keep it relevant, sometimes up to 500,000 times per month, (WOW!) depending on the individual client's needs." Obviously, Bart Wilson and your's truly are really concerned with that article. Many real estate agents will read this and say to themselves, "Wow, I need visibility. This is for me." And many Realtors will end up subscribing to that service because it is affordable... (?) (Can a realtor or anybody else afford to have his or her website banned from the search engines, Google included?). By submitting a site 500,000 times a month (!) to a search engine, FNNIS is breaking just about every rule and contravenes almost all Terms of Use of most of the major search engines, especially Googles'. I've been a practicing SEO since 1997 and one of the first things anybody learns in this business is, you don't even HAVE to submit a website to the engines anymore, since they all have crawlers that regularly visit your site and will index it. All you need to do is simply check your log files to find out when they came the last time... What you really need are good quality inbound links pointing to your site, in order to be found and indexed. The best way to do that is to lease links from a reputable link broker. The only exception to this is DMOZ or the Open Directory project, which is still a directory, not a search engine. Google actually uses DMOZ as its main search directory, so be sure to submit to it. But you only need to submit to it once, not 500,000 times! I nearly fell off my chair when I read that yesterday... Buyer beware! Posted on Businessblog™ 504 - September 17, 2004 - 1.28 PM EST Ask Jeeves and the Red Cross help hurricane victims Ask Jeeves has launched redcross.ask.com to offer people an easy way to help the Red Cross. Ask Jeeves will donate 100 percent of the profits generated from searches conducted on this site with a minimum donation of $50,000 and a maximum donation of $1 million. Posted on Businessblog™ 503 - September 16, 2004 - 9.17 PM EST FindWhat signs distribution deal with Bizjournals
Under the terms of an exclusive distribution agreement, FindWhat will supply Bizjournals and each of its 41 local metropolitan business news websites (like San Francisco, Atlanta and Boston) with targeted keyword advertisements (paid listings) through both search box and content matching implementations. Posted on Businessblog™ 502 - September 16, 2004 - 8.03 PM EST Google search outputs credit-card numbers Consumer's fear of identity and credit-card theft over the Internet continues to escalate. Yet analysts and retailers continue to assert that the risk is minimal. Basically, anybody who can use Google can get access to credit-card and personal-identification information. Posted on Businessblog™ 501 - September 15, 2004 - 2.12 PM EST Pay-per-Call: for advertisers without websites FindWhat.com wants to become the first major network distributor of pay-per-call, a new search tool that redirects searchers to advertisers' phone numbers instead of their websites. Advertisers who use FindWhat.com don't even need a Web site, because the company creates business profile pages that load when users query keywords relevant to an advertisers' business. Yahoo!'s Overture offers LocalMatch, a product that makes a similar hosted contact page available to advertisers in its network. Posted on Businessblog™ 500 - September 15, 2004 - 11.59 AM EST Study: men find things faster than women When it comes to searching for information on the Internet, men find things faster than women and are less easily distracted, a survey has claimed. Posted on Businessblog™ 499 - September 15, 2004 - 10.13 AM EST Hambrecht & Co. talks about Google's IPO Google's auction-style IPO, despite investor complaints and delays by regulators, met the goals the company's founders had for their initial offering, according to investment bankers WR Hambrecht & Co., who helped pioneer U.S. stock auctions. Free to talk after a five-month quiet period imposed by federal securities regulators, William Hambrecht and Clay Corbus, co-chief executive officers of the San Francisco firm, discussed details of the $1.9 billion deal, the largest Internet offering ever. Posted on Businessblog™ 498 - September 15, 2004 - 8.07 AM EST John Battelle reports on Amazon's A9 search engine While it’s been in beta for months, A9's major upgrade goes live today, and could become a one-stop search platform that offers interesting commercial possibilities that have the potential to trump traditional search players. Posted on Businessblog™ 497 - September 15, 2004 - 7.35 AM EST Google updates its local search service Google Local combines results from the Web with business-directory information to display local business listings and information. Google lets users conduct local searches either from its main Web query, displaying local results atop broader Web results, or from its Google Local site. Posted on Businessblog™
496 - September 14, 2004 - 3.12 PM EST Yahoo will acquire Musicmatch for $160 million Yahoo and Musicmatch have signed a definitive agreement under which Yahoo will acquire Musicmatch for a purchase price of $160 million in cash. The combination will substantially increase Yahoo’s music reach from 12.9 million to an estimated 23 million listeners . This extensive reach within an active and engaged music audience will make Yahoo! even more compelling for advertisers and record labels. Posted on Businessblog™ 495 - September 14, 2004 - 10.22 AM EST Search engine marketing for smaller retailers Unreal Marketing Solutions thinks small e-tailers have to keep it real when it comes to search engine marketing. That fact is a prime reason why the company is to launch a new hosted service designed specifically for small catalogers, chains and business-to-consumer e-commerce sites. Posted on Businessblog™ 494 - September 14, 2004 - 8.55 AM EST Potential lawsuit to hit Google news site Google went ahead with its news website, despite threats of legal action and allegations by local media of copyright infringement.
The controversies arose after the launch of Google's Hong Kong news on Thursday. The website for Hong Kong news cites news summaries and uses photos from local Chinese language media, including newspaper, radio and television, and provides hyperlinks to their websites. Posted on Businessblog™ 493 - September 14, 2004 - 6.55 AM EST Fidelity bought 23 percent of Google's shares Fidelity Investments, the world's largest mutual funds manager, bought $549 million of stock in Internet search engine Google, about 23 percent of the shares sold in the company's IPO in August. Boston-based Fidelity reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it holds 5.21 million Google Class A shares. That's about 16 percent of Class A stock and 1.9 percent of Google's total shares outstanding. Yesterday, CBS MarketWatch reported that Fidelity had originally bought 15.5 percent of Google stock. Posted on Businessblog™ 492 - September 13, 2004 - 3.36 PM EST FMR holds 15.5% of Google class A stock The parent company of mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments, FMR holds 15.5 percent of Google stock, according to a filing with the SEC. Posted on Businessblog™ 491 - September 13, 2004 - 1.59 PM EST ThomasB2B launches new online advertising network ThomasB2B.com will launch a new online advertising network which is based after similar ones from the likes of Yahoo's Overture and Google, but which differs in two key aspects.
First, it is focused exclusively on the business-to-business market; and second, it matches ads with search queries and content through predefined categories, not keywords. Posted on Businessblog™ 490 - September 13, 2004 - 10.45 AM EST America Online to launch shopping search engine AOL will introduce a shopping search engine called In-Store.com to go with the company's improved shopping section. It will be AOL's first offering to consumers who want to research products side by side before buying. As a result, comparison shopping websites and search engines such as Yahoo Shopping, Google's Froogle, MySimon, BizRate and Shopping.com are about to face some new competition from an old online player. An AOL spokesman would not comment on the impending announcement, but AOL executives who spoke on condition of anonymity said the new service had been in development for 18 months and would be accompanied by considerable promotion to AOL members, starting next week. "We've done a lot of heavy work to get back in the game," one executive said. Posted on Businessblog™ 
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