SEO Articles

Visit Rank for $ales

Read my bio

email me

Home

My 2 featured articles for the week ending Mar. 24, 2006:

Archived blogs for the week of March 27, 2006

1141 - March 30, 2006 - 1.35 PM EST

Google issues new stock, its shares drops

Google's stock reached almost $400 yesterday, then dropped in after hours trading to $385 after Google said it will be issuing more of its stock, in an additional 5,300,000 new share issue to raise an additional $2 billion.

The issuing of new shares in Google will partially meet the anticipated needs of index and mutual funds to purchase Google's common stock when its symbol, GOOG is added to the S&P 500 Index at the close of business on March 31.

Google said: "Proceeds from the offering will be used for general corporate purposes, including working capital and capital expenditures, and possible acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets. Goldman, Sachs & Co. will act as the sole underwriter for the offering.

Posted on Businessblog™

1140 - March 29, 2006 - 2.20 PM EST

Verizon becomes a Google AdWords reseller

Verizon's SuperPages are slated to begin taking advantage of their reach to thousands of small businesses under a recent agreement with Google.

Google has in effect inked a deal with Verizon where it will become a Google AdWords reseller.

The announcement was made at The Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local Conference in San Jose, CA.

With this deal, any small business can easily be swayed to advertise on a large chunk of the search engine web via Google AdWords and their local advertising offerings, which are unarguably much better than Google’s competition and include the powerful trifecta of Google, Ask.com and AOL.

Greg Sterling told C-Net News that deals like this “are critical to move the local search market forward, since these businesses would not go on their own to Google or Yahoo.”

“There is a lot of inertia in the small-business market, which relies on sales representatives to call them or visit,” Sterling said.

One question is will this pose a threat to current search engine marketing businesses?

Posted on Businessblog™

1139 - March 28, 2006 - 11.59 AM EST

3 new wireless-related patents filed by Google

Three new wireless patents filed by Google were published on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It's no secret Google wants to delve deeper into the wireless market.

Filed by Google employees Wesley Chan, Shioupyn Shen and former Google product management director Georges Harik, the patent applications propose reducing the overall cost of wireless access by offsetting it with advertisements on the service.

Google is seeking to expand its potential advertising base by moving much further into the wireless market. Filed in 2004 and published earlier this month, the patent applications address three distinct issues related to the wireless and advertising market.

Patent application No. 20060058019 seeks to develop a system for dynamically modifying the appearance of browser screens on a client device when connecting to a wireless access point.

Posted on Businessblog™

1138 - March 27, 2006 - 4.05 PM EST

Vast.com raises concerns in the SEM community

Like many of its competitors, Vast.com says it is just spidering the Internet for relevant content based on user queries and driving traffic to that content, just like other search engines.

But when required site registration is bypassed for any reason, server response speed plummets, performance is degraded and unqualified traffic is delivered.

"This is what some call "stealing content". There's no inherent advantage to have them steal," said Laurel Touby, founder and CEO of media industry site mediabistro.com.

Touby made that statement upon learning that Vast.com had linked from its search results to full mediabistro.com job listings pages, even though those pages require registration when accessed on the mediabistro.com site.

Vast.com CEO Naval Ravikant said Vast.com's crawlers do not automatically register or login to sites, so they must have found passage through the mediabistro.com system via a legitimate entryway.

Others are raising questions of resources. "Right now we're not thrilled with the impact [Vast.com] is having on our services," stated Mitch Golub, president of online auto classified publisher Cars.com.

Vast.com's crawlers "are taxing our server," he explained, noting that as the Vast.com makes contact with Cars.com's server to grab listings, they slow it down, which affects the site's user experience.

Craigslist last year raised similar issues about Oodle, which lists classifieds in a variety of categories including Real Estate, Services, Jobs and Pets. The aggregator complied craigslist's request to stop crawling its server for classifieds. Vast.com currently features listings derived from craigslist in its results pages.

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of Serge Thibodeau only and are not representative of any company listed. All slogans, trademarks, text or logo representation used or referred to on this blog are the property of their respective owners.