Q1 2008 Click Fraud Down from Last Quarter, Up from Last Year
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
Q1 2008 Click Fraud Down from Last Quarter, Up from Last Year
Click Forensics has released data showing a decline in click fraud rates in the first quarter of 2008. The overall industry number came in at 16.3%, which is down 16.6% quarter-over-quarter but up 14.8% year-over-year.
Search engine content networks saw a higher average click fraud rate at 27.8%, which is down 28.3% from last quarter but, again, up from last year by 21.9%.
Botnet click fraud traffic was up 8% year-over-year.
Search engines are addressing the click fraud problem head on. Yahoo recently announced the provision of Click Filter Reports, which show advertisers the number of discarded clicks in their PPC campaign.
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At Arm’s Length: Managing a Parent Company Dynamic
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
Since its acquisition of aQuantive in 2007, there’s been a bit of chatter around whether Microsoft should divest itself of the search marketing businesses it gained as part of the deal, namely Avenue A | Razorfish. Those in favor of this believe it’s a conflict of interest for Microsoft to own these types of businesses and also own the third most popular search engine.
The concern is twofold. The first is fear that Avenue A | Razorfish search engine optimization (SEO) teams could be granted access to the search engine’s algorithm or other proprietary information and gain an unfair competitive advantage in the search engine result pages (SERPs). The other concern is one of preferential treatment within the engine.
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So You Wanna Be a SearchMonkey?
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
So You Wanna Be a SearchMonkey? Yahoo is creating some wide open spaces for web developers. This is no API playground, people. It’s a zoo. SearchMonkey will let developers go hog wild with search results. Simple links are so old school. Listings could now include photos, reviews, ratings and contact information via developer mashups. Want portability? You got it. And if you don’t want it, you should. Yesterday, I reported that search is integral in finding social media results that affect a consumer’s opinion about brands. SearchMonkey should be a tremendous tool to help influence your online reputation. The launch party for SearchMonkey is May 15th. Here are the details: When:May 15, 2008, 5:30 – 8:30 p.m. (Read the full post about ‘So You Wanna Be a SearchMonkey?’…)
When Yahoo Shareholders’ Push Comes to Microsoft Shove
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
The continuing discussions of the possible Yahoo/Microsoft merger are starting to get monotonous. I have some Yahoo stock and, as a shareholder, I think it’s time the lesser players in this drama — the average small investor — unite to force this merger to go through.
Despite Yahoo’s profitable Q1 report, the stock price has actually dipped. I’d gladly take the increased value Microsoft is offering, take the cash and put it somewhere else — Baidu is looking good these days. Even the 20 percent jump in value Google had over this past week would have been nice — and brought the stock up to the Microsoft offering price.
Yahoo just doesn’t seem to hold any cache.
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Microsoft Earnings Key Takeaways: Where’s the Search?
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
Microsoft Earnings Key Takeaways: Where’s the Search? The biggest acquisition news yesterday wasn’t Microsoft-Yahoo but Arby’s-Wendy’s. In both cases, search marketers are asking, “Where’s the beef?” Better yet, analysts on the Microsoft conference call should have asked, “Where’s the search?” Microsoft search queries and page views are up year-over-year. By how much? No Wall St. analysts asked the question. Microsoft reported $4.4 billion in net income for the quarter. Microsoft’s online services business increased revenue 40 percent to $843 million, including $143 million from aQuantive, which added 96 new publishers this quarter to the Atlas Publisher Solutions, the ad management platform that competes with Google’s DoubleClick division. (Read the full post about ‘Microsoft Earnings Key Takeaways: Where’s the Search?’…)
What’s In Your Travel Tool Bag?
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
Last year at SES Travel, we had a well-rated session on what most travel search marketers use for SEO/SEM tools. Most online marketers have a bag of tools to reach for when faced with mission-critical tasks: keyword or competitive research, Web site analytics, or trend tracking. While there’s nothing particularly sexy about this topic, there’s no question most of us have a few favorites when we need to get data about site performance, market potential, and opportunities.
I recently asked a few search marketers who either have travel-focused clients or perform search marketing in-house for an online travel business what tools they use on a regular basis.
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T-minus 1 Day: Last Minute Rhetoric from Microsoft and Yahoo
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
T-minus 1 Day: Last Minute Rhetoric from Microsoft and Yahoo
On yesterday’s earnings call, Chris Liddell, Senior VP and CFO, affirmed recent statements by Steve Ballmer to focus on the online advertising market. He said that the strategy was based on three pillars:
- To drive innovation and search
- To increase value to advertisers and publishers
- To grow user engagement across MSN and Windows Live properties
Liddell said that Yahoo would accelerate that strategy. But later, he made this statement:
We’ve yet to see tangible evidence that our bid substantially undervalues the company. In fact we see the opposite.
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Laying The Groundwork For 10GbE Networks
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
The networking industry is in a period of transition now as 10GbE networks are becoming increasingly popular as a way to deliver bandwidth for demanding loads.
Network analysis vendors, however, argue that raw bandwidth alone isn’t enough to solve the problem of modern networking bottlenecks. Rather, they argue that networking analysis technology in the 10GbE era is more important than ever.
What it boils down to is analyzing network traffic at the packet level to ensure application performance. Without that level of understanding and analysis, vendors argue, the very survival of a company’s network could be at risk and with the 10GbE, the stakes are even higher than ever.
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Half-Million IIS Servers Hit in Cyber Attack
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
A massive cyberattack is targeting vulnerable Internet Information Server-based Web pages by redirecting visitors to the site toward one hosting malicious code, and it’s growing rapidly.
When Panda Security first noted the infestation, it put the number of infected IIS servers at 282,000. Not even a day later and security firm F-Secure wrote its own blog entry, putting the infestation at over 500,000.
The worst part of it all is that these infestations are not in seamy Web sites, they are taking place in legitimate Web pages. An IFRAME (define) redirects the user to another page, where identity-stealing malware is downloaded onto their computer. So even users who think they are staying clean are not safe.
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Who Are The Web 2.5 Winners?
Autor admin | 25.04.2008 | Category SEO
SAN FRANCISCO — Web 2.0 hasn’t peaked. In fact, it’s far from peaked, according to Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, a co-producer of the Web 2.0 Expo going on here this week.
“Are we really done yet?” O’Reilly asked the audience rhetorically. “We have a long way to go.”
O’Reilly said even though companies are dabbling with Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and wikis, they haven’t really penetrated enterprises in a “deep” way. He pointed to sites Dell’s Ideastorm as a good first step. The Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) community feedback site lets consumers suggest and vote on ideas the computer company should pursue.