Blackbird Web Marketing

I expected the Bing/Yahoo! search alliance to begin early Q1 of 2011.  Apparently things are ahead of schedule as I just received this notice for Microsoft AdCenter.

This is an exciting week for Bing as we reach another major milestone in the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This week, Bing will begin powering organic search results on Yahoo! Search for the English language in the United States and Canada.

After this organic transition is complete, Bing will power 5.2 billion monthly searches, which is 31.6 percent of the search market share in the United States and 8.6 percent share in Canada.¹ You can take advantage of this traffic by using search engine optimization (SEO) to complement your search campaigns and boost the visibility of your business. Bing webmaster tools can help you troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps, and view statistics about your sites—all to improve your visibility on Bing. Get started by visiting the Bing Toolbox or watching our video.

Advertise on Yahoo! Search and Bing through adCenter
If you currently advertise on Yahoo! Search, you will soon have the option to use a transition tool in Yahoo! Search Marketing that will walk you through the steps to transition your Yahoo! Search campaigns into Microsoft Advertising adCenter. This transition tool is currently in testing with a select group of advertisers. We plan to make it available to all Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers in the coming weeks, giving you the ability to advertise on Yahoo! Search and Bing with one adCenter ad buy.

To help you prepare for a successful transition, please continue to work with your existing support contacts and visit the Microsoft Transition Center for the latest information about the new marketplace. Remember, our primary goal is to provide you with a quality transition experience in 2010, while protecting the holiday season. However, if we conclude that it would improve the overall experience, we may choose to defer the transition to 2011.

We appreciate your business and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

Sincerely,

Your partners in the search alliance, Yahoo! and Microsoft

What is Nostradamo?

Right now just a broken link, using Google’s Keyword tool a new link appears

“New! Get traffic estimates using the improved backend (Nostradamo)”

Newswire reports that Google is planning on launching their own SEO firm. Full story here

The article states the following:

• Google is assembling a Google SEO team of approximately 100 employees
• Early estimates place the cost of this service in the neighborhood of $25,000 per month
• Google wants to set the standard for an industry that outsiders so often criticize

The question is whether or not this story is true?  Can anyone independently confirm?

I sincerely doubt the validity of this story as a Google SEO firm would eliminate the credibility of their search results.

Google appears to have launched a new version of their keyword research tool today.

You can view the tool here

Side by side tests between keywords returned using the new tool and the keywords from legacy show significant differences in search volume.

It seems to show more much more diverse keywords than the legacy tool. For example the keyword – medical tourism displayed 150 related keywords all containing medical tourism in the root word.

The new tool provided 8 main categories including groups related to: surgery, abroad, and hospitals.

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Building a strong presence on Search Engines is a must for any business intending on expanding their customer base.  The question is how high does your website have to rank in the search results to be successful.  Is the first page enough or do you need to be in the top five.  The following graphics outline a typical click through rate on the results page.

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Setting up Wordpress to ping Blog directories and search engines is a simple step to increasing traffic levels. WordPress bloggers can update their blog’s ping list from their Admin Dashboard > Options > Writing.

Instead of using the sole Ping service added by default, add the following Ping services to your default installation.

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Where is the best place to build domain diversity of your inbound links? None other then Google’s content network! How is this possible? Right now it is as easy as 1,2,3

1. Googlebot parses and crawls javascript

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When all your linking efforts fail, post pictures of kittens! (and other good linking insights)

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Bing’s search results are far better than anything Live ever returned. That’s not surprising though. For the longest time I thought Live was Microsoft’s version of StumbleUpon.

An interesting experiment is being run to compare Bing with Google and Yahoo! at http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Basically the search results are stripped of their brand (and any multimedia or local results)

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Google (and other the search engines) may soon be much better at executing javascript.  This point was futher comfirmed by Matt Cutts at this years SMX Advanced You and A Session.

While discussing alternative to page sculpting, Matt mentioned that Google will execute may types of java script making important for sponsored links rendering in java script to be rel=”nofollow”