SEARCH CLINIC

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.

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.

In the latest search engine usage results from comScore Bing again continues to grow in search numbers- whilst Google continues to decline.As the Search Clinic mused last month Could Bing overtake Google in the search engine rankings? Microsoft’s Bing is continue to grow in it’s usage.

However the growth is still not meteoric as Google still holds a commanding 65.4 per cent of the market.

But those results numbers show a trend over the past year in which each month Bing grabs a slightly bigger slice of the U.S. search engine pie, while Google sheds a tiny amount or stays flat.

For the month, Microsoft’s market share gain was just 0.2 of a percentage point, while Google’s loss was 0.3 of a point.

Yahoo, which traditionally has been losing market share, actually gained 0.2 of a percentage point last month, according to ComScore.

As always, the numbers include just explicit core searches that people manually enter on a Web page.

Reviewing the raw data- online searchers conducted more than 16.2 billion explicit core searches in April. Of those, Google had 10.6 billion, Bing had 2.3 billion, and Yahoo had 2.6 billion searches.

Google’s organic “powered by” searches, which include those at its own sites as well as Google-branded searches at AOL and Ask, accounted for 67.8 percent of all organic searches.

Microsoft’s “powered by” searches, which tap into those at Bing and Yahoo pages, took in 26.5 percent of all organic searches.

Compared with March, those numbers show a gain for Google and a decline for Microsoft. But looking at the longer-term picture over the past several months, Microsoft’s “powered by” searches have continued to inch up, while Google’s have gradually dipped.

The latest top UK search engine and social media figures have just been released by Hitwise for March 2011.

Google is still very much the dominant player in UK search, with Google Sites accounting for over 90% of all searches conducted by UK Internet users.

However, between February and March 2011, Google Sites lost 0.66% market share of searches, whilst Microsoft Sites increased their market share of searches by 0.28%.The growth of Microsoft sites, led by Bing, is more pronounced in the year-on-year figures.

Between March 2010 and March 2011 Bing was the only search engine to increase its volume of searches from UK Internet users.

Whilst Google, Yahoo!, Ask and other search providers all dipped in year-on-year change, Microsoft Sites improved their market share of searches by 1.43%.

This latest insight from Experian Hitwise underlines why it is important for brands to ensure they do not solely optimise content around Google at the expense of other search engines. Bing, Yahoo! and Ask each appeal to particular audiences and often send more of their traffic to key transactional industries such as retail, travel and finance.

“Microsoft is starting to make inroads into Google’s massive share of the search market, although Google remains the clear leader in absolute volume terms,” commented Experian Hitwise’s Research Director, Robin Goad. “It is vital that brands closely monitor the changing trends in the search market, as search typically accounts for between 40-50% of a website’s inbound traffic.”

As for social media- YouTube is the fastest growing social network in March 2011.

Facebook continued its dominance in the Experian Hitwise Social Networks and Forums category, accounting for over 56% of all visits to social networks from UK Internet users in March 2011.

However, Facebook’s market share of visits declined in March compared to February by 1.22%, mostly driven by increased visits to YouTube.

The UK’s most popular online video site accounted for 19.06% of all visits to social networks in March, up from 18.32% in February, making YouTube the fastest growing social network of March.

Year-on-year, the fastest growing social network was Facebook, increasing its market share of visits by 4.16% between March 2010 and March 2011. Despite Facebook’s slight drop in market share of visits in March 2011, the social behemoth is still attracting new visitors to its website every single day.

In the last three years Facebook has more than doubled its market share of visits to the Social Networks and Forums category, growing from 22% in March 2008 to 56% today.

Robin Goad commented: “The growth of Facebook is immense, and it is such an integral part of the online scene now that we would expect it to achieve a 60% market share of social visits at some point in 2011. Many companies are still apprehensive when it comes to exploiting social networks to promote their brand, but with such a huge online following, social networks are ignored at a marketer’s peril.  Facebook is now the second single biggest source of traffic to all websites after Google. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important that brands derive maximum benefit from this social network.”

The research is published by Hitwise at: http://www.hitwise.com/bing-the-fastest-growing-search-engine-in-the-uk/

New research shows around 5% of paid search spending is now in the mobile space and Google is the big winner!
The research reports that the budget for mobile search spending could double to 10%- around £600 million by the end of this year if the current mobile search spending keeps increasing at the given pace and not surprisingly, Google would own most of this money.

Just like Google has been dominating the online search share market in the UK with 90% marketing share, the majority (97%) of mobile search spend goes to Google, with Bing and Yahoo getting meager parts of the remaining 3.2 percent.

This report also confirms Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent statement at an IAB event Florida where he said “mobile is growing faster than expected and blowing all of his company’s internal projections out of the water”.

About 15% of the total search volume for all of Google’s search categories comes from mobile searches.

It’s not all good news for mobile search advertisers though.

The data from the report highlights higher a Cost per Click (CPC) and lower Click Through Rate (CTR) for mobile search campaigns- with 13% higher CPC and 30% lower CTR than traditional paid search campaigns.

What’s interesting to note is the significant influence Apple has over Google’s mobile search success.

Google dominates (around 95%) all the searches originating from the iPhone however 50% of these searches come from the toolbar (at the bottom of your iPhone main screen), 42% from Google’s homepage and less than 10% from Google’s app.

What might happen for example if either Bing or Yahoo! were to become the default search engine for the iPhone. Google’s share would be significantly impacted.

The report can be found at: http://blog.efrontier.com/mobile-search-user-behavior-is-changing-rapidly-and-marketing-opportunities-abound-

Yahoo has announced redundancies four times in three years, as it cuts costs to try to lift profits that trail bigger rival Google.
The redundancies also follow after Google recently announced a 10% pay increase for every member of staff.

In 2008 Yahoo rejected a £30 billion bid from Microsoft. Today its market capitalisation – the combined value of its shares – totals aprroximatly £15 billion.

Yahoo said in a statement: “Today’s personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo for revenue growth and margin expansion, and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace.”

The company’s revenues have risen by less than 2% so far this year, compared with growth of 23% at Google.

Yahoo had 14,100 employees at the end of September.

According to ad network Chitika the top two search engines on the iPhone . . . are both Google.

Coming out of the mobile search panel at SMX East earlier this month Chitika’s research director Dan Ruby presented data showing that Google is responsible for about a massive 97 percent (96.9 percent) of mobile search traffic that the company sees on its network.

Here’s the mobile search share breakdown according to Chitika:These numbers are very consistent with earlier numbers put out by StatCounter/Royal Pingdom, which showed Google with about 98 percent of mobile search overall.

Earlier research data in 2008 showed a more PC-like distribution of share. But all that appears to have changed dramatically in Google’s favour.

Following the conference Ruby took a look at the sources of Google’s traffic from the iPhone.

Chitika’s Ruby offered the following commentary:

Essentially, the Google App can stand on its own as the second largest search engine on the iPhone.

Yahoo! registers as the next search engine behind Google, but its 2.25% falls short of the Google App’s reach.

Bing is difficult to gauge, as traffic from the Bing app is too small to be accurately tracked at this time.

However, comparing the number of ratings for the Bing and Google apps in iTunes, Bing traffic could be anywhere between 1% and 4%. At the highest estimate, all of Bing’s traffic is still only about half of the Google app.

It’s worth noting how much larger a percentage the toolbar is driving in mobile, according to Chitika’s data, vs. the PC. (I was unable to find updated data but generally speaking it’s less than 20 percent of queries that come from the toolbar on a PC).

Finally here’s Chitika’s comparison of traffic/share from the Google app vs. all other traffic sources. According to Ruby, the Bing app doesn’t pass a referral URL so it’s challenging to track. Hence the two Bing entries below.

A word of caution: these numbers may not be equivalent to all mobile search traffic because they’re from a single network (on a single device), though based on millions of queries. But even if they’re off by a few points, it’s striking — to say the least — how dominant Google’s position in mobile search has become.

Last week Google announced that it was on course to pass the billion dollars in mobile ad revenue mark.

This research was compiled at: http://searchengineland.com/report-the-top-two-iphone-search-engines-are-both-google-53153?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+searchengineland+%28Search+Engine+Land%29

The number of search engine keyword search terms are a good predictor of the success of films, songs and video games even weeks ahead of release, researchers have found.
The findings echo a study in April showing that the number of mentions of a film on Twitter could predict its opening box office take.

However, in some cases predictions based on search do not significantly improve on those made with other data.

The research appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was carried out by a team at the research arm of search firm Yahoo.

They compared the total number of searches containing a given term, such as the title of an upcoming film, determining how much that number correlated with the film’s success on release.  They did the same with songs on the US’ Billboard 100 music chart and video games.

In all three cases, the correlations were strong – a much-searched term was a good predictor of the eventual success, even as much as six weeks ahead of time.

For the most part, the search data did not much improve on those made based on different, more traditional data.

Study co-author Jake Hofman explained that the search data seemed to make the most difference in the case where the data available ahead of release was limited, such as video games.

Bernardo Huberman, the HP researcher who showed substantially similar results using the volume of tweets about films, called the new effort is “good work”, in no small part because “they have a lot of data – they’re Yahoo”.

He pointed out that prior work by Google researchers indicated a similar correlation exists between house prices and search terms.

The picture that’s starting to emerge is one in which millions of people are essentially browsing for data, and us being able to capture that browsing allows you to predict.

Yahoo’s Dr Watts remarked on possible future implications of the approach, saying that “you could imagine expanding this study to other kinds of consumer behaviour, thinking about hotel vacancy rates or how many people will be flying into Las Vegas this weekend – all of that is probably correlated with some kind of search activity”.

However, the crystal ball that people’s technological habits might represent is not, he said, always the most important thing.

“In life, it’s not so interesting sometimes to predict the future, but to know what to do once you know what the future will look like.”

Search Engine Optimisation SEO tips, tools, tutorials guide and techniques Part 2 YouTube VideosContinuing the series on online marketing today Dr Search publishes his second video on search engine optimisation (SEO) tips explaining organic listings and guiding the pros and cons of organic listing- a long term great value but seldom instant results process.

Second part of Dr Search the Principal Consultant at the Search Clinic’s lecture at the University of Gloucestershire on online marketing to to businesses, professionals and students at the 5th annual Gloucestershire Professionals conference in June 2009.

More than 300 people attended the conference with over 60 attending Dr Search’s lecture on Online Marketing Tips, Strategies and plan the most cost effective tools for online marketing business.

Of the 12 seminars during the day Dr Search received the top rating with 93% of the attendees saying that he was relevant to their needs and 86% of attendees rated the content as highly rated.

Please let me know what you think of the video. Have you found it useful? Was there anything else that you would like to learn about? Please contact Dr Search by clicking here now.

Please have a look at the other videos as they become live on the Search Clinic YouTube Channel.