SEARCH CLINIC

Google has reported a large rise in profits and sales in the three months to September.The search engine said net income in the third quarter surged 26% to £1.74 billion, up from £1.44 billion in the same period of last year.

Earlier this year, Google launched Google+, a social network to take on Facebook.

“People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate,” claimed Google head Larry Page.

The profits were well ahead of market expectations, and shares in the company rose 6% in trading after the market closed.

This is the fourth successive quarter that the company has increased it’s sales income.

Sales revenue rose 33% to £6.48 billion ($9.72 billion) – just shy of having a quarterly turnover of $10 billion.

Mr larry Page said “We had a great quarter,” he said. “Google+ is now open to everyone and we just passed the 40 million user mark.”

Facebook by comparison has around 800 million users.

As well as generating money through advertising based on search, Google also makes the increasinly popular Android mobile phone operating system.

After testing in Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost per click bids.

“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team.

This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal.

If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was.

The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivising advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding.

Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.

Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.

“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”

The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.

From: http://searchengineland.com/google-tweaks-adwords-to-give-landing-page-quality-more-weight

Google is marking its teenage years by turning its home page into a birthday party scene.Surrounded by multi-coloured balloons and streamers, its logo is adorned with party hats and sits behind a table heaped with wrapped presents and a large white birthday cake with 13 candles.

Although Google’s founders Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built their first search engine in 1996, it was not until 1998 when the graduated with PhDs that they formalised their research and created Google.

The company filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, and the Google.com domain was registered on September 15. The search engine officially celebrates its birthday on September 27.

The pair came up with the name as a play on the word “googol”, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

“The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists and the scope of Google’s mission: To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” claims Google.

The anniversary comes at a time when the company faces increasing legislative scrutiny and is locked in intense rivalries with the social networking site Facebook and smart phone operator Apple.

The search engine recently launched its Google+ social networking service to all users, in an effort to counter Facebook’s rising popularity.

However, other research shows that Google enjoys a 90 per cent share of the global internet search market and over 30% of the smart phone OS market.

The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is to warn a television industry gathering that he wants Google to play a far bigger role in combating piracy.Mr Hunt is to speak at the Royal Television Society in Cambridge, and will start to give some ideas of the shape of the forthcoming Communications Act, which will dictate the way the media are regulated in Britain over the next decade.

In part of his speech he will mention the regulation of the online world, emphasising that the law should apply online in the same way it does in the real world. Here’s what he’s expected to say:

“We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online. We intend to take measures to make it more and more difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity.”

He is supposed to suggest a number of other ideas including:

In other words, the government wants to make piracy sites harder to find and harder to make pay – and it believes internet giants, from Google to BT, have a responsibility to play their part.

Mr Hunt will be taking this message to gathering of many of the same television executives who listened to Google’s Eric Schmidt at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Mr Schmidt’s message of deregulation and peace and love between TV and the net seemed to go down fairly well last month.

But a TV industry increasingly anxious about the threat to its profits from the online world may be more sympathetic to the Culture Secretary’s promises of protection.

For Google, though, responding to this call to take responsibility may involve some very tricky politics.

Yahoo’s chief executive Carol Bartz has been fired by the search company after only two and a half years in the top job.The company said in a statement that Ms Bartz was removed by the board of directors with immediate effect.

Tim Morse, Yahoo’s chief financial officer, will take over from Ms Bartz.

Yahoo has been struggling to increase its market share as it faces increased competition from rivals such as Google and Facebook.

Yahoo shares jumped more than 6% in after hours trading after news of the firing broke- Yahoo’s stock price was up at $13.72, an increase of 81 cents.

Mr Morse will serve as interim chief executive and the board of directors will look for a new CEO, the company said.

Ms Bartz was hired to run Yahoo in early 2009, taking over from co-founder Jerry Yang.

She made significant changes to the management team and cut jobs to save on costs. She also shifted the focus of the traditionally search oriented firm towards more personalised content.

Critics claim that Yahoo has failed to make significant strides in two of the most lucrative segments of the market – search and social networking.

The news first broke on the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D website, which quoted an email from Ms Bartz to Yahoo staff. The email has since been reported by other news agencies including Bloomberg and Reuters.

“I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s chairman of the board,” Ms Bartz said in the email to staff.  ”It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.”

As news of the sacking spread across the internet, Yahoo released its own press statement in which it confirmed it was undergoing a “leadership reorganisation” and that Ms Bartz would be leaving the company.

Roy Bostock, chairman of Yahoo’s board, said in the statement: “On behalf of the entire board, I want to thank Carol for her service to Yahoo during a critical time of transition in the company’s history, and against a very challenging macro-economic backdrop.”

Despite being one of the pioneers in the online search business, Yahoo has seen its market share dwindle in recent times. Not only have the users turned to its rivals, advertisers have also been ditching the company.

Analysts said a lack of focus and direction have hurt the company’s image.

Unless a new leader can get many more of us to start talking about and using Yahoo’s services, then the sad, long process of gentle anonymous decline looks set to continue.

You’ve got a wonderful new website- so the world is going to be knocking your door down. Or so you hope.After the initial disappointment comes the realisation that it’s a big world out there.

If your website starts with the word “welcome” congratulations- there are over three billion other websites listed by Google making the same mistake.

Go on- ask yourself how often do you search for “welcome”?

To get online traffic depends on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO has a number of factors:

1. Technical (how well can it be crawled by the search engines)
2. On page (what’s on the page being crawled)
3. Off page (mainly building links)

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it.

Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value and has greatly improved the quality of web search.

Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

Of course Google does not just use links; they use over 200 indicators such as:

• domain name
• meta tags
• alt tags
• directory names
• filenames
• heading tags
• link popularity (how many links back to you there are)
• link text (anchor text indicating the subject of the link)
• page title
• Page Rank

PageRank™ is Google’s patented method to assign a numerical algorithm and weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page.

In short the whole basis of Google’s success- is that success of website pages breeds success.

If you think that buying links is the key to your future success- hold on!

To find the pitfalls of blindly building links, just have a quick look at Google’s own links building rules .

As the article on paid links makes clear: “Buying or selling links that pass PageRanking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results”

So, what you need are good quality links and lots of them.

But what is meant by good quality links?

The seven most important factors for link quality are:

Contextual links. One way is obvious and contextual just means appearing within the natural flow of a page’s text. If the link is reciprocal, Google sometimes discounts some of the value of that link.

High authority websites. Getting one link from the Telelgraph or DMOZ is possible worth more than 10,000 links from your new site. Authority does not
just mean high PageRank- but a site that is also well established as one of the most important sites for a topic.

Relevant / related links. If you have loads of sites that are irrelevant / unrelated to your sites topic you will probably lose out. In natural linking by people, they tend to link to one another within the same topics and industry. Spammers- like addicts don’t care where they get their fix- or link.

Diversity of link sources. Having many links from another site is good but it’s probably better to have one link each from many sites. The former could be spam. The latter is harder to achieve.

Deep links. If you only have links pointing to your homepage and no deep links to other pages in your site then you will probably have less success than with a proportion of deep links.

Different anchor texts -the actual text of the link. For example “Dr Search is an online marketing professional” is something we might be able to place with small variations, but hundreds and thousand of individuals who may link to us will vary the text they use just because they will as they all think slightly differently.

Consistent links growth. Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. Acquiring 20,000 links on one day unless your marketing goes viral is very unlikely for the vast majority of sites, so any search engine will rightly be suspicious.

Travel websites in the UK have recovered a lot of UK searchers according to new research.Highlights of the ecommerce research include:
• Travel websites bounced back this quarter with all of the major travel brands rising up the rankings since May 2011. One in five websites in the Hot Shops List this quarter came from the travel sector.
• Having dropped out of the Top 50, cinema brands Odeon (ranked 37th) and Vue (44th) both returned to it this quarter. Cineworld also rose up the rankings in a strong three months for the movie industry.
• The fastest movers in the Hot Shops List during the last three months were: Travel Republic (up 18 places), Odeon Cinemas (+14), First Choice (+12), Travelodge (+12) and Cineworld (+9). Next was also a notable climber this quarter, moving up two places to 3rd in the Hot Shops List above Tesco and Play.com.
• Entertainment retailers Play.com, HMV and GAME all fell in the rankings , revealing a decline in demand for video games, DVDs and CDs.

Overall analysis revealed that discount fashion brand Matalan was the success story of the quarter, up 15 places in the Hot Shops List since May.

Matalan reached its highest ever position in the Hot Shops List , ranked 40th overall, up from 68th position in August 2010.

The fashion and homeware retailer revealed in its Q1 trading statement that online sales had doubled compared with Q1 2010, and UK internet visits to the Matalan website reached record levels in July 2011, accounting for 2.14% of all visits to fashion retail websites.

Next was another fashion brand to perform strongly during this period becoming the third biggest retailer in the Hot Shops List.

In the process of climbing to third spot in the August list, Next overtook Tesco, which fell to fourth place this quarter.

Other supermarket brands also dropped down the rankings between May and August, including Sainsbury’s (down 5 places) and ASDA (-2).

Travel brands surged back up the list this quarter with Thomson the best performing travel brand ranking 10th overall.

Travel Republic was the fastest moving retailer of the quarter, up 18 places to 28th in the list. Budget airlines easyJet and Ryanair also climbed the rankings as consumers booked last minute flights abroad.

First Choice returned to the Top 50 after a dip in performance last quarter.

You can download the IMRG-Hitwise Hot Shops List : http://hitwise.chtah.com/a/tBOSkRXB8U3jIB8c0UgAAAb42q-/download

US technology company Microsoft has announced that it’s annual revenues hit a record of £43.4 billion.
Sales of the company’s Xbox 360 videogame console and its Office software helped fuel the growth.

Net income at the world’s biggest software maker jumped 23% to 23.15bn for the year.

The figures, which beat forecasts, showed final quarter revenues reached a record high of £10.85 billion, leading to profits of £3.73 billion,  boosted chiefly by sales of Office, Xbox and server software behind Microsoft’s push into cloud computing.

Microsoft’s business division, which sells the Office suite of programs, including Outlook, SharePoint and Excel, was the company’s biggest seller in the quarter, increasing sales by 7% to £3.65 billion.

The company’s online services unit, which runs the Bing search engine and MSN internet portal, increased sales by 16.5% to £ 413 milion, but saw losses increase to £455 million as it struggles to fight competitor Google.

One weaker spot was sales of its widely-used Windows product, which are slowing as tablet PC sales eat into demand for traditional PCs.

Microsoft is itself expected to enter the tablet market next year with the launch of its next operating system, code-named Windows 8, which will be compatible with the low-power chips commonly used by tablet and mobile phone makers.

Microsoft’s share price (MSFT) at around $27 is still some way off it’s record of $37.06 which was posted on 29 October 2007.

Yahoo has reported a drop in its sales revenue for the second quarter due to weaker-than-expected advertising sales.
The company said it generated £670 million in revenue in the three months to June, a 4.6% decline compared to the same period last year.

The results have come as Yahoo has been facing increasing competition from rivals Google and Facebook.

However, despite a drop in revenue, Yahoo said its profits rose by 11% from a year ago to £148 million.

Carol Bartz, the chief executive of Yahoo said the second quarter was a “mix of good, encouraging and, at the same time, unsatisfactory” developments.  The issue was we did not have enough sales people in front of the big clients,” she said.

Increased competition from its rivals is the not the only issue that Yahoo has had to deal with.

In May, it suffered a big setback in China after the internet company Alibaba, in which Yahoo has a 43% stake, transferred one its key assets, Alipay, to a company controlled by its founder Jack Ma.

Yahoo shares have fallen more than 20% since then because investors are worried that it may have lost out on one of Alibaba’s key businesses.

The company has assured its backers that it is trying to resolve the issue.

“We have been working on this negotiation continuously, in fact daily,” said Ms Bartz.

However, analysts said the latest data indicated that Yahoo will find it tough to turn things around soon.

Britons’ web usage are more likely to be requested by UK authorities than in almost any other country according to figures released by Google.The search engine’s Transparency Report shows that in the six months to last December, British intelligence agencies, police and other government bodies asked Google to hand over data 1,162 times.

In raw numbers of requests, the United States topped the international table of 26 developed countries, with 4,601, but when population size was taken into account in an analysis by The Telegraph, it was relegated to fifth.

On this per head basis, only Singapore, which has been criticised by Human Rights Watch as an “authoritarian state”, asked for private data more frequently than Britain.

Australia came third, with 345 requests, and France fourth, with 1,021.

Google did not release details of the data requested, but it is likely to have included web search terms, emails and YouTube activity.

In some cases British authorities do not require a warrant or court order to access such data.

“We hope this tool will shine some light on the appropriate scope and authority of government requests to obtain user data around the globe,” Google said.

“Requests may ask for data about a number of different users or just one user. A single request may ask for several types of data but be valid only for one type and not for another; in those cases, we disclose only the information we believe we are legally required to share.”

Google also released figures on how regularly it removes material such as YouTube videos in response to official requests.

British authorites asked Google to remove content 38 times, including one request by the Office of Fair Trading that more than 93,000 adverts linked to fraud were taken offline.

By comparison, in Germany, which has strict laws against Nazi imagery, authorites made 118 content removal requests.

Brazil topped the table with 263 requests.