TrueLocal Local Search Engine Goes Live TrueLocal is a consumer-facing local search engine that has been operating “under the radar” (except for appearances at SES) for awhile. Run by search-engine veteran Jake Baillie, the company is owned by database provider Geosign, which delivers local data to many of the marquee search and portal providers. That’s [...]

Blog Comment Spamming Leads to Google Banning For those of you who are new to search engine optimization and have been approach by or have seen ads for “blog submission software”, be warned, such blog comment spamming software probably will lead to your site being banned by Google and other search engines. A new user [...]

Enter the Yahoo Shoposphere Building on its “social search” template, Yahoo! has revamped shopping and added in a range of new personalization and community features. There’s a heavy emphasis here on community reviews as a way to “filter” information. There are also degrees of trust built into the system (i.e., my community, friends of friends). [...]

Blocking Google Analytics Tracking The free launch of Google Analytics is a great thing for many smaller web publishers and bloggers, who could not afford services such as Webtrends or Urchin, and is sure to lead to widespread adoption around the site publishing industry, as well as privacy concerns. Google Analytics is also probably part [...]

Google Analytics Fast Adoption Leads to Slow Service Google Analytics, the new Google branded free web based version of Urchin, launched this morning to webmaster fanfare, which may lead to the end of such stat providers as Freestats or Extreme-DM. However, like many other Google launches, Google Analytics has been experiencing downtime and maintenance warnings [...]

Google Targets Verticals As Ad Sales Tool Google has set up a page of metrics and marketing copy (by vertical) to show advertisers by industry how consumers are looking for their goods or services online. Local metrics and Google’s local targeting capabilities are featured in several of the vertical pages (i.e., Automotive, Real Estate, Tech [...]

Yahoo Search Engine Update #5 Yahoo Search is running another update to their search engine today, as Tim Mayer pointed out on the Yahoo Search Blog last night. Tim said in the post that “You should see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index. [...]

Google Analytics Launches to Enhance Conversions Google has finally spun Urchin into a new Google branded analytics tool which Google is offering for free to site publishers; Google Analytics. Well, its free up to 5 million pageviews per month, so if you have a fairly high traffic site in need of analytics, Google requests that [...]