Google Plus One
Google wants likes too: +1 adds shared links to Buzz profiles, impacts search results of followers; http://eicker.at/PlusOne
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Updates Social Search
Google: Social Search will now be mixed throughout results, adds notes, connects social media; http://eicker.at/SocialSearch
Gerrit Eicker
Search vs. Curation
Teicher: Are search rankings an outdated system? Is there a single best answer? http://eicker.at/SearchVsCuration
Gerrit Eicker
Black Hat SEO
Segal: The dirty little secrets of search. Or: the J. C. Penney case. Cutts: We take strong action; http://eicker.at/BlackHatSEO
Gerrit Eicker
Huffington Goes AOL
Aol. acquires The Huffington Post (HuffPo) for $315M: Arianna Huffington stays editor-in-chief; http://eicker.at/HuffingtonAol
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Gerrit Eicker
HuffPo: “AOL Inc. announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors. … The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age – leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement. … As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.”
Huffington: “By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform. … Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.”
ATD: “For AOL, the deal gives them a site that is very good at generating lots page views and impressions very efficiently–which is the company’s whole thrust these days. – That means lots more ad inventory to sell and an injection of content talent, giving AOL more scale it desperately needs. – The move also obviously gives AOL a much-needed editorial identity and cohesion, which it doesn’t really have. … Five time multiple to the Huffington Post’s $65 million in expected revenue for the coming year, one-eighth of AOL’s market valuation, the offer was accepted quickly.”
Guardian: “The sale to AOL marks a personal triumph for Ariana Huffington, the colourful and controversial co-founder of the site that bore her name, who under the terms of the deal is given a new role as president and editor in chief of a unit to be named Huffington Post Media Group, and includes management of AOL’s sprawling news operations and other media enterprises such as TechCrunch and MapQuest. … Originally a politics blog aimed at Democrats, the Huffington Post branched out into celebrity coverage and turned itself into one of the biggest pieces of real estate in online news media in the US, rapidly overtaking more established media organisations such as the Washington Post by deftly utilising the internet to exploit untapped markets.”
NYT: “The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline. … By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business. … One of The Huffington Post’s strengths has been creating an online community of readers with tens of millions of people. … The sale means a huge payout for Huffington Post investors and holders of its stock and options, who stand to profit earlier than if the company had waited to grow large enough for an initial public offering. … ‘The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,’ Mr. Armstrong said.”
RWW: “Can the Huffington Post strategy bring in as much or more revenue than that? While eyeballs have come online fast, ad revenues have been much slower to move. That’s in large part because in the old media world, advertisers used to say “half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half that is. So they bought both halves. Online, that’s not the case. Every click and every conversion is countable – so ad buys can be made much more rational. Thus much less media gets sponsored. It’s hard to say how this is all going to play out in the long run. – AOL is making a strong move, though, in spending more than an entire financial quarter’s subscription revenue on one big content shop and its leadership.”
TC: “Arianna Huffington’s genius is to churn out enough SEO crap to bring in the traffic and then to use the resulting advertising revenue – and her personal influence – to employ top class reporters and commentators to drag the quality average back up. And somehow it works. In the past six months journostars like Howard Fineman, Timothy L. O’Brien and Peter Goodman have all been added to the HuffPo’s swelling masthead, and rather than watering down the site’s political voice, it has stayed true to its core beliefs. Such is the benefit of being bank-rolled by a rich liberal who doesn’t give a shit.”
Gerrit Eicker
Curation
Why search fails and why curation probably returns as a new foundation for a new algorithmic search; http://eicker.at/Curation
Gerrit Eicker
Quora
A(nother) central, social FAQ? Quora is an improving collection of questions and answers; http://eicker.at/Quora (via @oliverg)
Gerrit Eicker
Web Engagement Management
WEM, Web Engagement Management, may replace ‘CMS‘ for using content to deliver business results in 2011; http://eicker.at/WEM
Gerrit Eicker
Google Self-promotion
WSJ: Google increasingly is promoting some of its own content over that of rival websites; http://eicker.at/GoogleSelfPromotion
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Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: “The Internet giant is displaying links to its own services – such as local-business information or its Google Health service – above the links to other, non-Google content found by its search engine. … Critics include executives at travel site TripAdvisor.com, health site WebMD.com and local-business reviews sites Yelp.com and Citysearch.com, among others. … The EU received a complaint from a shopping-search site that claimed it and other similar sites saw their traffic drop after Google began promoting its own Product Search service above conventional search results. … The issue isn’t entirely new. The company for several years has used prominent links to services such as Google Finance and Google Maps to boost their popularity, with varying results.”
Google: “When someone searches for a place on Google, we still provide the usual web results linking to great sites; we simply organize those results around places to make it much faster to find what you’re looking for. For example, earlier this year we introduced Place Search to help people make more informed decisions about where to go. Place pages organize results around a particular place to help users find great sources of photos, reviews and essential facts. This makes it much easier to see and compare places and find great sites with local information.”
SEL: “The question of Google’s right to refer traffic to its own sites is once again in the center of policy debate. The European Commission is looking at this issue as part of its larger anti-trust investigation against Google. It’s also a question at the heart of the federal regulatory review of the ITA acquisition. … What are or should be Google’s ‘obligations’ to third party publishers? This is the central question it seems to me. – These are all very difficult issues and become extremely problematic at the level of execution. If regulators start intervening in Google’s ability to control its algorithm and its own SERP it sets a bad precedent and compromises Google’s ability to innovate and maybe even compete over time. … It has also been held by courts that the content of SERPs is an ‘editorial’ arena protected by the First Amendment. So hypothetically Google could only show Google-related results and still be within the law. … Google’s dominance of the market may decline in a few years. I’m not a laissez-faire, free-market lover but the market may take care of itself. Facebook and others are working on ways to discover content that don’t require conventional search-engine usage.”
TC: “Displaying local results this way is a little less in your face, but the end result is the same. In both cases, the main link still goes to the businesses’ own websites, but the Google Places links are also prominent. Either way, the message is clear to local businesses: list your profile in Google Places and you will have a better shot at appearing at the top of the first search results page. – Are these results better for users? It depends on how good are the Google Places listings. Some of them are very good, I will admit. But try any local search and I bet you will consistently get Google Places results, sometimes taking up most of page – not always at the very top, but always as a block. They can’t all be better than results for businesses which don’t happen to have a Google Places listing. Remember, Google Places is still fairly new and developing.“
Gerrit Eicker
eBook SEO
Dension: 3 best practices for getting Google to notice your eBook; http://eicker.at/eBookSEO
Google: “First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). … Second, we’ve made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. … Third, we’ve given you more control over how you connect accounts, and made connecting accounts more convenient. … As always, you’ll only get social search results when you choose to log in to your Google Account. We’re starting to roll out the updates today on Google.com in English only and you’ll see them appear in the coming week.”
GigaOM: “Google is slowly finding its social legs and is rolling out a set of improvements to its search product that help it keep pace with rivals, who are increasingly weaving social signals into search results. … It’s not the social layer that Google is said to be working on. But it’s another sign that shows Google is figuring out how social fits into its existing properties. The pressure is on the web giant to sort out its strategy in search as rivals like Bing and upstarts Blekko, Greplin, Wajam and others bring the fight to Google.”
FC: “This is a clever, if subtle, way to inject a little extra social relevance into Google’s core business of search, and it will make Googling something seem a little more personalized than simply interacting with a blind, international giant digital tool. It also differentiates it from competitors, like the fast-growing Bing… Will this trick work to convince us Google’s good at social media? Is this the very first layer of social network technology that may become the rumored Google Me social network? We can’t tell. Maybe we’ll Google it up and see what our friends, co-workers and that girl from the coffee shop we once Twittered think.”
RWW: “This, however, is personalization taken to another level. This is personalization in the form of looking at who you know, who you’re connected to on various social networks, and ranking content according to who created it and who shared it. We were told that Google will even go a step further and look at content shared by friends of friends. … Your friends don’t have to even have a Google profile for their content to show up in your search. If you’re friends with them on Twitter and you connect your Twitter account, you can see what they share on Twitter in your search results. … A move to create another, stand-alone social network would seem like folly to some, especially with the company’s track record when it comes to social. This move, on the other hand, feels just right. Gather the information and use it as yet another signal on what is relevant to your search.”