April, 2008 News:

Google improves image search

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Google is in the process of developing new search technology to enable it to recognise and rank images more accurately.
The search engine hopes to make image searches as accurate and relevant as text search by using technology to read the image.
Currently, finding pictures through Google Image Search is currently imperfect, as the search engine has […]

Click fraud down slightly in Q1 2008

Monday, April 28th, 2008

The industry click fraud rate has dropped slightly in the first three months of 2008, though click fraud is still more of a problem then this time last year, according to Click Forensics.
Click Forensics gathers data from more than 4,000 agencies and advertisers to produce its Click Fraud Index reports.
According to the figures, 16.3% of […]

Search traffic up for retailers

Friday, April 25th, 2008

Search engines are becoming more and more important for online retailers, with the percentage of traffic from shopper’s search queries rising in 2007, with more finding a site via Google or Yahoo than going direct to an e-commerce site.
According to stats from web measurement firm Hitwise, the top 500 retailers received more traffic from search […]

Organic search results preferred over PPC ads

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Web searchers generally favour organic results over paid links, and are less likely to look beyond the first three pages of search engine results.
These findings come from an iProspect ‘Blended Search Results Study’, conducted by Jupiter Research.
According to this study, almost 70% of web users said they normally click on a link in the first […]

Everything you need to know about search engine marketing

Friday, April 18th, 2008

We have just come across Mo Serious TV, a stupendously good collection of raps by Chuck (aka ‘The Poetic Prophet’, aka ‘The SEO Rapper’) and had to share it with you as a special Friday afternoon treat for anyone who hasn’t seen or heard the hilarious raps.
Who is the SEO Rapper? According to his own […]

Yahoo trials Google search ads

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Yahoo will begin to delver Google search ads in its own search results pages, as part of a limited test on Yahoo.com in the US.
The test is expected to last around two weeks and will be limited to roughly 3% of Yahoo search queries. It is specifically for Google’s AdSense for Search service, so Yahoo […]

Google introduces new AdWords trademark policy

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

Google announced on Friday that, from May 5th, it will allow open keyword bidding on all search terms in the UK and Ireland.
This means that registered trademarks can now be bid on by competitors, whereas previously they could only show ads for trademarked terms with other words in the search query.
This open bidding for keywords […]

Google search share up, paid clicks decrease

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Google continued to increase its US search market share last month, according figures from comScore.
The search engine’s share of the market rose from 58.5% to 59.2% in February; while rivals Microsoft and Yahoo saw their figures drop slightly.
Yahoo’s share slipped to 21.6 percent, from 22.2 percent a month earlier, while Microsoft’s share slipped to 9.6 […]

DoubleClick deal means Google controls 69% of the online ad market

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

The Google-DoubleClick acquisition has taken nearly a year to conclude, but the deal means that the search engine will now control an estimated 69% of the online advertising market.
The deal was opposed by Yahoo and Microsoft due to concerns about the dominance it would give Google in the online ad space, and a new survey […]