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IN THE JULY ISSUE...
YAHOO SEARCH MARKETING SPONSORED LISTINGS NO LONGER ON MSN
Yahoo Search Marketing Website, 06/01/2006
MSN's U.S. search distribution agreement with Yahoo! Search Marketing ends this month, and Yahoo! Sponsored Search listings will no longer appear in MSN's U.S. search results. Although we regret the loss of MSN as a distribution partner, it was not unexpected, and we do not anticipate a significant change in the total amount of traffic to our advertisers as a result.
We expect that MSN will continue to display Yahoo! Search Marketing Content Match listings in the U.S., and Sponsored Search listings in non-U.S. markets, beyond June 2006.
Jason Lee Miller, Searchnewz, 06/21/2006
When a blog called Monetize published "The Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Billions of Pages Indexed by Google" pointing to an SEOer's black hat trick of returning 5.5 billion spammy results in under three weeks, the SEM world did a giant collective spit take.
Google has since deleted all of the pages cluttering up the Big Daddy database, and an insider tells John Battelle that Google exaggerates the number of results returned, by as much as 263 times, if count estimates are in the billions (and if the commentator's math is correct).
Monetize's step-by-step guide instructs readers to:
1. Register a meaningless
domain consisting of numbers, letters, and secret symbols.
2. Buy as many article databases as you can.
3. Create or buy a common scraper script.
4. Launch your blog comment spam attack
Ana Aman gives another how-to here.
MSN and Yahoo! didn't return near the level of pages Google returned for the spamgantic domain, but Google apologists were quick to point out the speed and expansiveness of Google's crawlers. According to Email Battles, MSN had indexed just 62 of the bogus sites in that time.
That so many pages were outranking legitimate webpages and increasing the cost of PPC ads at the same time raised serious questions among search engine marketers about the possibility of click fraud and the extent of rank drop among websites.
Google engineer Adam Lasnik chimed in on John Battelle's blog to shine some light on the situation:
we noticed that lots of
subdomains got indexed last week -- and sometimes listed in search results
-- that shouldn't have been. Compounding the issue, our result count estimates
in these contexts was MANY orders of magnitude off. For example, the one
site that supposedly had 5.5 billion pages in the index actually had under
1/100,000th of that.
So how did this happen? We pushed some corrupted data with our index.
Once we diagnosed the problem, we started rolling the data back and pushed
something better... and we've been putting in place checks so that this
kind of thing doesn't happen again.
Some quick math by a subsequent commentator dropped the 5.5 billion subdomains to just under 21 million. The commentator, going by "JG" asks, without receiving an answer, what that means for the actual number of search results returned from the rest of Google's index.
REPORT: ADVERTISERS WASTED $800M ON 'CLICK FRAUD'
Stephen Bryant, PC Magazine, 07/06/2006
Advertisers wasted over $800 million last year on phony clicks, prompting many to blame Google and Yahoo for extensive fraud, according to a report released on July 5.
The survey, by Outsell Inc., a market researcher in Burlingame, Calif., takes a close look at click fraud, which has been nagging Google and Yahoo for several years. Both Google and Yahoo recently settled click fraud lawsuits, though their problems with click fraud persist.
According to the report, advertisers say they believe 14.6 percent of all clicks are bogus, and 75 percent of those advertisers say they've been victims at least once. That perception of click fraud has prompted 27 percent of advertisers to reduce or stop their spending on click-based advertising.
Another 10 percent said they intend to curtail their spending, meaning a total of 37 percent of advertisers are decreasing their pay-per-click spending.
"If we take the 37 percent of advertisers who have reduced or intend to reduce their PPC and apply the average 33 percent reduction rate, we see a 12 percent hit to total PPC ad spending, said Chuck Richard, vice president and lead analyst for Outsell, in the report. "In other words, as strong as PPC ad growth still is, it would be 12 percent higher if the click fraud problem had not driven this large group of advertisers to lower their PPC spending."
MYSPACE MAY BE LINKED WITH SEARCH ENGINES
Associated Press, 06/13/2006
News Corp. could let one of the larger Web search engines, like Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. or Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, take over the search function on popular social networking site MySpace.com, a News Corp. executive said Tuesday.
Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Media & Telecom Conference, Peter Chernin, News Corp.'s chief operating officer, said such a move would be one of the most lucrative ways to monetize MySpace, the popular online destination that News Corp. acquired last year.
Since News Corp. bought MySpace last year for $580 million, interest in the site has been high, with analysts and investors hoping it will drive growth at the company. The site has been wildly popular among younger users and has more than 75 million members. But thus far, News Corp. is still looking for ways to profit from its many users without looking "uncool." Chernin has said he is "extremely bullish" on the company's new media initiatives.
Chernin said Tuesday that News Corp. is "probably too late"
to make a significant mark in the search arena, but plans to find "some
strategic combination" of the user traffic generated by its Internet
sites and its vast array of entertainment content to get the most revenue
out of its Web-based properties.
MySpace is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, but the site's search function isn't so dominant. In April, MySpace's search function made up 0.6 percent of all U.S. online searches, according to comScore Networks, which specializes in measurement and analysis of consumer behavior and attitudes.
Class A shares of News Corp. fell 34 cents, or 1.8 percent, to close Tuesday at $18.39 on the New York Stock Exchange. The media company is based in New York.