Searchlight

In the process of reviewing a client's Flickr account with my colleague and fellow Searchlight blogger Brian Brown, we noticed that Flickr has recently added nofollow tags to links placed within its Web site. Flickr has been one of the few social-media entities to continue to offer "link juice" from links placed with user-generated content (in this case photo descriptions), making it a viable entity for improving inbound links to a given site.

While it's understandable that Flickr implemented nofollow tags for the exact same reason other social-media sites have--misuse and spamming--it nonetheless marks another step toward the end of major social-media sites passing on PageRank.

It's not all bad news with Flickr, though...at least not so far. The nofollow tags have not been implemented throughout the whole site. While links embedded in individual photo descriptions are nofollowed, so far, links in Set and Collection descriptions continue to be free of them. Will this change? Only time will tell. SEOers everywhere are certainly hoping not.

As much as most high-quality SEOers (those who practice search engine optimization "honorably") like to think of their pursuit as pure and intellectual, the fact of the matter is that search engine optimization is a form of marketing, no matter how you approach it.

Perhaps short of nonprofit organizations and the occasional Internet artist, people interested in getting their Web pages in top search results are interested in making money from the traffic that will come from those search engine links.

A recent Hitwise article revealed some interesting demographic numbers that the company has measured through its sources. In comparing American Google and Yahoo search users, Hitwise found that Google has a higher percentage of users in older age brackets than Yahoo.

This negates some of existing beliefs in the market about the composition of those two user groups; a commonly held belief has been that Yahoo was for the aged, Google for the youth. Maybe not:

• In the category of users 55 and older, Google has 1.5 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 45- to 54-year-old users, Google has 2 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 35- to 44-year-old users, the market share was more or less equal.
• In the category of 25- to 34-year-old users, Yahoo has almost 3 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 18-to 24-year-old users, Yahoo has 1.5 percent more of the market share.

It makes for a very nice, even curve! One implication that can be drawn from this is that, since older Americans tend to have more money than their younger counterparts, and Google users in general also tend to be more affluent, targeting the Google search engine over other engines makes much more marketing sense. Of course, this is in addition to the fact that Google's market share in the search world hovers somewhere around 60 percent, while Yahoo's hovers around 20 percent.

Google's search dominance isn't any sort of secret, but if these demographic numbers are accurate, the point is further magnified. Other search engines shouldn't be ignored by those investing in search optimization, but it's no wonder that SEOers are so quick to focus on Google; it offers the best bang for the SEO buck.

The term and concept of Microhoo can be dated back a couple of years now, but it looks to be much more of a reality today than it ever was. Thursday night, Microsoft sent a letter to Yahoo offering $31 per share in cash and stocks. This is more than 50 percent over the worth of the company relative to its Nasdaq trading price this week. The bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo (it adds up to $44.6 billion) is surely a way for both companies to best do battle against Google, and such a move is ripe with many serious ramifications both inside and outside the world of SEO.

Speculation is rife on the Internet about the possibilities of the deal coming to fruition and the ramifications if it does. Stock prices are swelling and wavering, and investors are scrambling to properly position themselves. So, what's the most important issue in my view? Well, I just don't think they're going to call it Microhoo. I think there are better options.

Yicrosoft, for example, has a better ring to it and seems less questioning than "micro-who?" The name Mihoo looses the identity of both companies, and Yacrosoft sounds downright regurgitated. Mahoo, I am told, has predefined connotations (Google it), and Yicrohoo, if it doesn't have predefined connotations, really should. And what about Microsoft's Live search portal? It would seem to be the logical match to Yahoo. Could they go with Livehoo? It's certainly better than Yalive, which looks slick but could easily be mispronounced as "olive."

The winner in my book is Yasoft. It just sounds cool. Oh sure, there are a couple of small entities out there that may lay claim to the name, but no one that couldn't be bought out for five figures. The "Ya" says "yes" while the "soft" says "safe," as if it could just as easily be a high-end brand of bathroom tissue...which is exactly what Yahoo stockholders are going to need to dab at their tears if this deal doesn't go through. Come to think of it, they should grab the name either way.

These days, there are several ways to get a customized or internal search engine free of charge. Google's Custom Search Engine (CSE) and Yahoo's Search Builder lead the way, and their products are fairly easy to implement. After the Big Two, there are several services trying to make their mark, but one that that stands out is the Swicki from Eurekster.

A Swicki is a combination search portal and widget that can be customized on any topic or topics either within a Web site, group of Web sites, or the Web at large. The end product is a custom search experience returning relevant, targeted results as well as revenue opportunity (yes, you can monetize your visitors!) for blog and Web site publishers.

A Swicki is created in a fairly simple, four-step process. And, they can be shared, so if creating one seems like too much of a hassle, there are literally thousands to simply grab for free from Eurekster.com. These neat little customizable search engines look nice on a Web site or blog and they pull information from a combination of sources, including Blinkx's video feed.

But there's more to a Swicki than that, especially from an SEO perspective. First of all, the company has its own search engine, spidering the Web and producing its own results--and, it works very well. Secondly, the social search widget included in the Swicki features a customizable tag cloud that adds popular search terms automatically to the Web page upon which it is embedded, making it easy for the Swicki user to reflect popular keywords or build their brand.

But what's unique is that the Swicki search results ranking is reflective of every previous keyword search, click, vote and user behavior within each customized Swicki, lending a publisher-guided and community-powered slant to the results. While this might not be ideal for general search, it can really improve upon the search experience when used within the context of a niche or topic of interest.

Search is a constantly evolving and changing entity, and this year has certainly seen more than its fair share of change. Possibly highest on the list has been the move to blended or universal results. Much of the focus and discussion has revolved around Google Universal, but they aren't the only game in town and all the majors have now entered into blended results to some extent or another.

This presents interesting opportunities and challenges. Those who focus on developing a fuller and broader Web presence, adding video, news, blogs, images, local content and social media to the mix, greatly increase their opportunities to gain rank positions across all the engines. The challenge however will be that the results across the engines may become even more varied, as each engine puts its own spin on the blending.

It's still very early in the game as the engines continue to ramp up and tweak their algos as they evolve and introduce searchers to blended results. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of blended search across the different engines. Today, results vary within the engines. Some searches show little to no signs of blended results, and others, show considerably more.

For an interesting example, let's take a look at a single search across the engines and see how they compare. Since we are talking about how blended search is evolving, what better search term than "cavemen" to use as a test. It is an interesting term for our test because it has such a wide frame of reference and actually poses a rather interesting challenge for the engines. Depending on the searcher, it may carry very different connotations:

• Prehistoric humans
• The definition of the word itself
• The ad campaign for the Geico commercials
• The newly launched sitcom on ABC based on the Geico commercials

Here are screenshots of that search in Google, Yahoo, MSN (Live Search) and Ask. It is interesting to see the variety of the impact of blended results across the engines, from very little to considerable impact. As you experiment with different searches though, you may see the engines' position on this scale shift up or down.

Along with calling out some of the specific blended results, I've also noted some of the refinement options, such as related searches, narrowed or expanded searches, and Yahoo's new "Search Assist."

While the survival of the new Cavemen series may be in question, the continued evolution and survival of blended search is without doubt.

Whether you have multiple locations or just one, local is fast becoming an important market online. Traditionally, the local marketing battlefield consisted of phone directory listings, billboards, newspapers, TV, radio, and anywhere else that made sense to get your name seen. The web and search engines have opened up a new local battlefield, and smart businesses are moving quickly to gain a foothold.

Surprisingly though, many businesses have failed to tap into one of the more powerful tools available for reaching the local market. If that's surprising, then what makes this amazing is that this tool is free and will become even more important as local search information continues to be blended into regular search results.

The major search engines saw the growth and importance in local search years ago and started putting tools in place to not only help searchers, but also businesses. What the search engines may have discovered was that many searchers weren't aware of these local search tools, like local.google.com and local.yahoo.com. Instead, people just searched for local things where they searched for everything else, which further helps to explain things like universal search.

What was really exciting though was that the search engines also provided businesses with a way to get listed. Yet many businesses have yet to tap into this opportunity. If this sounds like you, then there is no time to waste, and better yet, getting listed takes no time at all. The process varies by engine, but is often as simple as having a postcard sent to your business address, receiving an automated phone call at your business location, or filling out a form or email.

Google

Go to local.google.com and click on the "Add or Edit your business: Learn more" link along the left side. If you don't have a Google Account yet, you'll need to create one. Once you've done that, you'll get access to the Local Business Center, where you can add or edit your business listing.

Yahoo

At listings.local.yahoo.com, you'll see that Yahoo provides different listing levels, including a basic free listing. The Basic listing is done in 4 easy steps, while the paid versions have an extra step or two.

MSN Live Search

Not as direct, you'll need to click on the Help link in the upper right corner at local.live.com, and then select the first FAQ item, "How do I add my business listing to Live Search Maps?" From there you'll get a link to an infoUSA.com form for adding or updating your information as need be.

Ask

Even Ask wants to list your local business. Even less intuitive than the others, you'll need to follow the Help link in the upper right corner at city.ask.com, then toward the bottom of the FAQs is one labeled, "I'm not finding my business in AskCity. How can I get it added?" With Ask, you'll need to send off an email with some information to Ask's Customer Service.

Web site owners and SEOs alike often feel at odds with the search engines, but times are changing. This was often the case in the past when the engines made updates and changes to their algorithms that seemed to send Web sites into a SERP tailspin, leaving everyone scrambling to regain their precious page-one positions. The engines were also a lot less forthcoming with information and guidance, perhaps taking the view that giving this information gave too much power to the spammers and phishers.

While this view was understandable on the surface, it didn't float all that well in reality. In the real world, those who are out to game and manipulate the engines may have as many or more resources to keep up with the engines than "the rest of us." So over the last few years, the search engines have continued to be more open with what they consider important as well as what abuses may get sites into trouble, perhaps realizing that there are also a lot of sites that may not have been purposely trying to mislead the engines, but were just victims of bad advice. And of course the algorithms have become far more powerful and fine-tuned than they once were.

By openly helping everyone, they are really just helping to raise the bar of quality for all sites, and maybe even making it even harder for bad sites to game the engines. Along with providing more detailed information and answering more and more questions publicly, the greatest advancement they have made has been in creating tools to actually give site owners (who have validated their sites) more information about their sites than they've ever experienced before.

Webmaster Central and Webmaster Tools

Google introduced Webmaster Central, which continues to add more and more features for site owners. Not surprising, Webmaster Central is leading the pack in delivering great information and tools to Webmasters. At the center, literally, is Webmaster Tools, which provides site owners with fairly detailed information on site crawling, queries, considerably more backlink information than can be queried outside of Tools, and much more. The query information in particular provides an unprecedented view of the search phrases that a site is showing up for, including those terms that aren't actually delivering traffic to the site.

Site Explorer

Yahoo's Site Explorer is still lacking in a few areas compared with Google's Webmaster Tools, but they almost make up for that with their powerful link information. Through simple drop-down menus, it is quick and easy to tailor results based on links to a specific page or the entire site, to include all links or to exclude links from the site and focus on external links only. Yahoo added a new feature that may give even more control to site owners. The Dynamic URLs tab gives site owners the ability to inform Yahoo of their site's dynamic URL patterns to help eliminate duplicate content issues, better handling of multiparameter URLs, addressing session IDs, and even presenting "cleaner" URLs in search results. Ideally, it would be best to address as many of these issues through rewrites and the robots.txt file on the server, but this is a great addition as a backup or for when that isn't possible.

Webmaster Portal

Trying not to be outdone, the Live Search team at MSN recently announced their entry into the mix with the Webmaster Portal, currently in beta and by request only. Little detailed information is available, but their tool also is claiming to help troubleshoot crawl issues, assist with sitemaps, and provide site statistics, including a replacement to the "link:" operator query that was decommissioned back in March. The portal is slated to be fully available to the public by late fall, but it may be worthwhile to request an invite to participate in the beta now.

The advancement in all of these tools is great news to Webmasters and SEOs alike. They continue to put more information and control into our hands. Not wanting to be outdone by the others, hopefully each of the engines will add each other's additions to their own toolsets. As each of these is free, there is no reason for site owners not to take a few minutes to validate their sites and start spending a little time each month putting these tools to work for them. This is one invitation from the spiders you don't want to turn down.

Search (or more precisely the search results) is undergoing some of the greatest changes we've ever seen with the influence of local search, mobile search, personalization, and universal search. Search marketers and site owners alike are bouncing between wild speculation and frantic contemplation of how search will change and what impact those changes will have.

Who better to turn to on the topic of search results than Gord Hotchkiss and his team at Enquiro. Now famous for their eye tracking studies revealing the infamous "Golden Triangle" and F-shaped patterns of user scanning of SERPs, Enquiro takes a bold step to try to track user interaction with Google universal and personalized results, and an even bolder leap of predicting the result pages we may see in 2010.

Enquiro just made available a must-read whitepaper, Search Engine Results: 2010, for anyone dealing with search in any way. Along with the traditional eye tracking studies done for this report, they assembled a dream-team of industry experts to discuss thoughts and ideas on the future of search results.

Merely a sampling of highlights, what follows are some of the great nuggets to explore from this report, starting off with a quote that truly encapsulates the report's essence:

There is, without a doubt, great passion about the future of search and we strongly believe that the next three years will represent the most exciting era yet in the short history of web search.

Intent

Usually when we talk about websites, search engines, and intent, we refer to the intent on the part of the SEO or web designer... white-hat versus black-hat, delivering relevant content versus gaming the engines. This however is a whole new intent... the intent of the user.

Much of the future for search will come down to the ability for search engines to identify searcher intent. A great illustration of this comes from Justin Osmer, product manager for Microsoft Live search,

"An area that we're focusing on over here at Live search is thinking more about the mode in which people are in when they're using search."

Are searchers looking to buy, to research, or just to be entertained? Each of these modes may dictate very different results for the same search.

Google personalization and universal are trying to tap into that intent as well, based on previous search history as well as by serving up a mix of content types, including maps, blog posts, videos, and the traditional textual results. Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land and chief content officer for Third Door Media, added to the discussion on the importance of relevancy in how the information is presented, such as providing maps for appropriate location searches or the ability to list blog results based on recency as well as relevancy. It's not just about presenting the results, but presenting them in the format that matches the searcher's intent.

Interaction

One area that will see great exploration will be in how users interact with search engines. As RSS adoption continues to grow and the sheer amount of information in its many formats expands, users will continue to look to search engines to be more than just a search destination, but a source of information aggregation; the search engine as portal, pulling and updating news and other content based on the user's preferences.

A particularly interesting comment was made by Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search User Experience and Interface Design, that furthers the sense that search engines will continue their evolution beyond search:

"I think that people will be annotating search results pages and web pages a lot. They're going to be rating them, they're going to be reviewing them. They're going to be marking them up..."

The separate mention of "web pages" may be another reason why the development of a Google Browser would be so important. Tapping into the web browser might lead to that ability to annotate and rate those pages and further help Google identify what content interests the user.

While Chris Sherman, executive editor of Search Engine Land, feels that advancement within search personalization is still fairly limited, he offered up an interesting interactive approach that the search engines might pursue,

"...submitting a page of content and analyzing the full text of that page and then tying that in conjunction with our past behavior..."

as a way to allow users to interact with search engines and help bring about better results.

New Search Patterns

Google personalized and universal results are still slowly trickling into everyday searches. Enquiro created sample pages representing a futurized version based on where these new results may be headed to see the potential impact on user interaction through eye tracking.

While this was very limited and exploratory research, it may hint at the important impact these changes may have. The eye tracking revealed how the introduction of images, as long as they are relevant, may begin to alter the search pattern into more of an "E" pattern than an "F" pattern, with the image forming the middle connection. Searchers may then expand their attention to the title and description accompanying that image, and then may move above or below the invisible line drawn by that image, depending on which cluster of results appears more relevant based on personalization.

To wrap up, search marketing is making a natural shift, somewhat downgrading those things that have been synonymous with SEO, like rankings, keywords, and optimization, to a much greater focus on the users, tying into their intent and interests at the time of search. Personalization will make site stickiness ever more important. Securing a position in users history, becoming an authoritative go-to source for information, will be more critical than ever. Winning in the SERPs will require much more than just position.

This new whitepaper from Enquiro is filled with much more detailed and interesting discussion than could ever be covered here, so be sure to download your own copy today. The time to prepare for all the exciting changes in search is now, after all, 2010 is only three years away.

As part of this week's Search Engine Strategies - San Jose convention, I was invited to a private party with fifty or so of top folks in the SEO world. The event was called the "Vintage Tub and Bath Event" and took place at the beautiful Japanese gardens and restaurant in Saratoga, Hakone. Attendees included representatives of Yahoo, Live Search (MSN), and, of course, Google.

One of the top entertainments of the evening was slot-car racing. There were many races, and they were open to anyone at the party. But then the smackdown came: a race between the search engines to see who is truly fastest.

It was an exciting and tense race, with each of the participants balancing control and speed just as real race car drivers do. And, like real races, the cars were painted up to represent each company's logos. In the end, Yahoo took the checkered flag, followed by MSN Search in second, and (oh my goodness) Google losing the race! (Ask was a no-show).

When asked what his winning strategy was, Yahoo jockey Tim Mayer answered, "I just stayed on the track."

Emcee Allan Dick quickly relayed that information. "Did you hear that folks?" he asked. "Yahoo says to stay on track!"

Rest well tonight, People of Search. It's all been solved. Yahoo is the fastest.