Search Engine Journal

TechCrunch is reporting a rumor — and it’s often correct in these — that the telephony “management” startup GrandCentral has been acquired by Google for $50 million. This is not Google as phone company per se, it’s Google as a system to manage calls on top of the existing telephony infrastructure.
Google Talk is an IP […]

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In April, I wrote a blog post, “Domain Names Have Become True Commodities”. It’s now June and the market for Domain names is still rising in prices. It’s much like the housing market two years ago, not quite as hot and profitable yet, but there are a lot of people making serious money from domain […]

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The Red Cardinal blog tells the tale of a Wordpress Plugin killing the rankings of a site in Google as the Mobile Wordpress Plugin is apparently redirecting the Googlebot from the blog homepage to a non-existant error page.
The plugin is redirecting both the Googlebot and Yahoo Slurp, but is not damaging the MSNbot’s page crawling.

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Yahoo has taken the step to combine both its search marketing & display advertising groups under one unified advertising sales division which will be headed by David Karnstedt, who is the current head of the Yahoo Search sales force.
Via the merging of the two sales arms, advertisers will now be able to purchase and hopefully […]

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A recent eye tracking research from Enquiro looked into Chinese user behavior regarding search results in Baidu and Google. Gord Hotchkiss wrote about this on Search Engine Land.
According to this interesting study there are considerable differences between how users interact with the results. (The research has also looked at the difference between user interaction […]

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Although all external Wikipedia links are using the nofollow attribute since January of this year, links from the encyclopedia are still important because of other reasons than ranking in search engines.
Next to generating human traffic from people who read Wikipedia articles, external links from Wikipedia also reinforce the authority of a site for the subject […]

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Yahoo Search is now powering the search results within the Bebo social network.
According to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, Bebo users can now use Yahoo Search Technology to search through Bebo profiles, music and the Internet. It appears that Yahoo Search Marketing is also appearing in Bebo results.
Is this a sign that Yahoo will be […]

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A study on the search behavior of French Canadians has just been released by Skooiz (a Montreal based SEM agency) and Mastodonte Communication.
1272 French Canadian users were surveyed on 17 questions about their search behavior and attitudes towards search results and online advertising.
Key Findings from the study are as follows:

French Canadians are very active web […]

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Does W3C compliance impact a site’s search rankings? The question has been mulled on Search Engine Journal in the past and the basic conclusion is that although W3C is incredibly important for browser compatibility and overall site usability, it does not have a direct impact on Google rankings, especially since Google’s pages themselves do not […]

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Business.com, the B2B search engine & directory, is up for sale and according to the Wall Street Journal, the web destination hopes to attract valuation between $300 and $400 million via an auction managed by Credit Suisse.
Dow Jones and the New York Times (which owns About.com) may be interested buyers in the major business directory […]

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