SEO Blog

Here’s a quick tidbit floating around this afternoon. According to a number or sources, including TechWeb and SearchEngineWatch, an agreement has been signed between Google and Opera regarding Opera’s Mobile browsers. Under a one year contract, Opera will use Google as the default engine for Opera Mobile and the soon to be released Opera Mini (server based browser that runs on cell phones). Check TechWeb’s report for more details.

We just caught a report from Jason Lee Miller over Webpronews about a new meta search engine that recently went live. PRASE, short for Page Rank Assisted Search Engine, is geared to assist SEM’s by immediately displaying the page rank of each listing returned.

PRASE gathers its results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. After a query is entered, PRASE brings back a neatly organized list sorted by its own page rank system. Each listing shows which search engine it was taken from, as well as the rank given to it by that engine. All duplicates are removed.

According to Miller, PRASE “sorts results three times-first by search engine, second according to PageRank, and then finalizing the results by listing in descending order according to their search engine ranking.”

Users can select results to stem from all three engines, or each engine separately.

Although PRASE is currently a meta engine, the design team claims it will function as a stand along engine at some point in the future.

PRASE was created by Johnson Design, LLC, located in Lexington Kentucky, and is currently still in beta. More information about PRASE will be posted to Metamend’s sitemap in the future.

A recent report from Techshout warns about a possible new Trojan virus targeting Google AdSense. The malicious code apparently replaces legitimate AdSense listings with fake ones, formatted to look like the real deal.

The virus was originally discovered by Indian publisher Raoul Bangera, who reported the problem to Google. Bangera logged the incident with screenshots and log files, which he sent over to Google for analysis.

The AdSense team stated, “We can confirm from the screenshots that these are fake Google ads, formatted to look like legitimate ads. We agree that this phenomenon is likely the result of malicious software installed on your computer.”

The Trojan loads itself onto unsuspecting computers from infected web sites. If users click on the fake ads, they are forwarded through a number of ad pages to a final ad farm page.

AdSense lets publishers display Google ads on their own websites. At this point, the virus only seems to affect smaller publishers.

The big boys always seem to take heat when modifications are made to their services. Then again, the smaller guys tend to be more cautious and less ‘experimental’ when it comes to implementing changes. Google has recently harvested criticism by incorporating jump pages into its Google Base site in a move they are calling ‘an experiment with navigation.’

Jump pages are typically used in advertising campaigns. They’re meant to provide expanded info on products or detail special offers etc, before a user reaches the destination page. In Google’s case, you’re taken to an ‘item details page’ that displays attributes, labels, links to related items and a separate URL to the content owner’s website. Prior to this, visitors were taken directly to the owner’s website from the Google Base results page.

A lot of content providers are not happy with this, feeling it may impede traffic to their sites. There is concern that users may shy away from using Google Base if they are subjected to jump pages, and a fear that this ‘experiment’ may lead to future ad targeting.