Google has launched the SearchWiki addon to its search results which allows users to re-rank and comment on search results. Of course, this does not affect the main index, but it is a big first step into more personalized search results.

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

This could mean a lot of things for search in the future. I’m very curious as to how popular this feature will be. If the masses are very interested in customized searches, it could mean a whole new era for the SEO industry for both good and bad. This could be used to help weed out poor sites that manipulate rankings, but it could also be used to ensure large popular sites further dominate search results. For right now, there appears to be no plans to use data from the SearchWiki in the main algorithm.

According to reports, Google has abandoned the proposed advertising deal with Yahoo that has been in review by the Department of Justice since June of this year. Apparently, Google doesn’t want to get into a long drawn-out fight with the Justice Department now that regulators have come out and said they will file suit to stop the deal.

This is a massive blow to Yahoo who was really looking to this deal to bring in some much needed revenue. Now that the Microsoft deal is dead, I’m not sure what Yahoo is going to do.

Yahoo’s management has been under pressure since rejecting the $33 a share offer from Microsoft, which valued the company at $47.5bn (£29.4bn).

Yahoo shares were trading at $14 each on Wednesday.

Now that the Google deal has fallen through, Yahoo may find itself having to try to do another deal with Microsoft, although Microsoft has publicly said it is no longer interested.

Carl Icahn, a Yahoo investor who now sits on its board, went as far as to try to sack the entire Yahoo board to try to resurrect the Microsoft deal.

Of course, the other option is for Yahoo to find some way to salvage their ad program and not rely on a competitor to power its advertising. I remember seeing the grand unveiling of their new ad platform and it actually caused their stock price to drop further. Seems like nothing but bad news for Yahoo today.

Here is a great article on the search engine space, spending, market share, and some odds and ends relating to search in 2008. I’m especially interested in their projected spending for SEO. According to the article, 19.3% of total search dollars was spent on SEO and it’s estimated to reach 22.8% by 2011. This of course is at the expense of paid search and paid inclusion programs.

I have to admit, I’m a little shocked by the statistic that 80% of SEO spending is spent on in-house initiatives as opposed to outsourcing to SEM companies. It’s apparently become very commonplace for medium to large businesses to hire an SEM team in-house to take care of their organic SEO needs.

Another thing to note is that according to these figures, people are becoming more and more search savvy. Longer keyword searches are up while single term searches are down. Searchers are realizing more and more that looking for more specific information provides better results.

It looks like Google has been busy putting together some updates for Google Analytics. There are a number of really cool additions, but I’m really looking forward to the visualizations they are adding. The new, cleaner look and feel is great. Google Analytics continues to be the best. Check out their YouTube channel to see the new features in action.

http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=AFDC0271A9E3C759

I think the title pretty much says it all.  Gives us all something to do on a Sunday afternoon.

http://www.google.co.uk/landing/thingstodo/

CNN Money has a great article on Yahoo’s continuing woes. The credit crisis seems to be hitting Yahoo really hard at a time when they’re needing growth more than anything. Years have gone by while Yahoo struggles to turn around the company. It doesn’t help any that the deal between Google and Yahoo still has not been approved by the Justice Department. On top of that, Google is projected to take an even larger market share.

Yahoo is steadily losing market share to Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), the leader in paid search. Google will score 73.5% of the $10.4 billion that advertisers will spend on search in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer. Yahoo has a 13.3% share. (In 2007, Yahoo had a 15% share and a 20% share in 2006.)

The continued decline of Yahoo makes me wonder how much longer they’ll be doing what they’re doing. They still have a very large number of users and I know that some other company would love to have them.

Yahoo has introduced two major programs to increase profits in both search and display. The company struck an advertising deal with Google in June to outsource a portion of search ads. Yahoo hopes to generate as much as $800 million from the partnership next year. However, the Justice Department has delayed the deal while it conducts an antitrust review. Yahoo also introduced a new service last month to make selling display ads easier for marketers. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang called the APT platform a “game changer.”

Yahoo seriously needs to consider diversifying a little bit like Google has been (gmail, google checkout, android, etc..). Their biggest deal is outsourcing a portion of their ads to their biggest competitor. I don’t know what they can do to turn the whole thing around outside of developing some new products or purchasing some existing popular sites/applications such as digg.

Today, Yahoo hit a five year low for their stock price.

I talked with someone recently that was reading the Google blog and saw a post about URL rewriting being unnecessary. I wanted to comment here because a lot of people don’t understand the perspective Google is writing many of their ‘how to’ blog posts from. SEO testing has shown URL rewriting does work well and makes it easier for the engines to index pages. It’s also beneficial to have URLs that accurately describe the content in a good hierarchy. Logical layout comes directly from Google’s Webmaster guidelines. The problem with rewriting comes when someone does not know what they are doing and inadvertently causes serious spidering/indexing problems for the search engines.

Google’s stance is always ‘don’t make our job harder’. They have always promoted URL rewriting and apparently there are now more people messing their sites up with it than fixing things so they no longer promote it. The biggest thing to consider in Google’s comment is this:

Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static?

Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:

1. It’s quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It’s much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
4. If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.

Their main premise here is that it is hard to rewrite URLs and it can cause more problems than it’s worth for novice Webmasters. Basically, Google doesn’t like the fact people can make dynamic content appear static via the URL. If used properly though, URL rewrites can be invaluable to a site.

For your rewrite to be effective make sure you consider the following:

1. URLs should be logical and follow a hierarchy. If your site is structured into categories and products, a good URL would look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/category/product.html. This makes sure a URL is treated like breadcrumbs. A dynamic URL generally shows no hierarchy at all.
2.Make sure you don’t end up with duplicate content on your site.
3. Make sure the rewrite actually works properly and isn’t returning the wrong pages, 404s, etc… It’s best to use some kind of spider simulation tool and spider the site yourself.
4. The URLs should remove as many unnecessary parameters as possible. Simply converting an ugly dynamic URL to an ugly static URL doesn’t help anything. Dividing variables with / instead of & does not a good URL make.

The facts of the matter are that good, clean URLs are better for search engines and users alike. Saying dynamic URLs are better than static URLs goes against all accepted rules of usability. Just don’t break your site with a rewrite that doesn’t work correctly. You really have to be careful what you take from Google’s blog posts because they are aimed at the entire base of Webmasters and not necessarily at mid to high level programmers. This post from Google is basically throwing the baby out with the bath water.

In a pretty under the radar move, Google removed two really important things from their Webmaster guidelines:

“Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open
Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific
expert sites. “

“Have other relevant sites link to yours. “

Initially, the buzz was over whether or not Google was finally going to officially separate itself from corrupt DMOZ and stop counting directory links altogether, but I think it’s more important to consider Google’s continuing ‘devaluation’ of linking in their official dogma. The reality is the opposite though. A search engine that has built its foundation on linking has to spend the majority of its quality assurance time filtering out poor and manipulative links. They did, however, leave in the guideline relating to engaging in manipulative linking.

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

A Google groups discussion began about it and some Google representatives did make comments about it. John Mu commented:

“This line was removed because we feel that you should not “force”
other sites to link to yours. Obviously it’s good that sites link to
each other, it’s fine to encourage that on your sites to link out and
to make it easy for them to link to yours. However, I don’t think we
need to make it a part of the guidelines that you should “have other
sites link to yours” — they should be willing to do that on their
own, it should be their decision not yours.

I hope that makes sense. “

This seems to be classic Google Utopian ideology. Fortunately for them, they are so big they don’t have to worry about getting exposure on the Web. So, not only is Google saying not to buy links, they are expanding their definition to cover being proactive and getting others to link to you. I understand that Google doesn’t want people polluting their system with piles of paid links, but they are really passing the ‘Web exposure’ buck here to other forms of advertising. They seem to believe that a search engine is NOT the place to get exposure.

If links lead to rankings and links should come exclusively as a result of good exposure, then according to Google, rankings should not be for exposure, but instead simply reflect existing exposure. There are millions of awesome Web sites out there that no one will ever see because they are ranked poorly and don’t use banner advertisements. I guess Google’s solution for those Webmasters is to use Adwords and help their stock grow more. Google is increasingly becoming a ‘what’s popular’ engine instead of a real search engine. Apparently, if you want to find new sites with good content, you have to stick with stumbleupon.