SEO Blog

In an effort to recover advertising revenues from Google and YouTube, the a number of television network and entertainment giants are said to be working to form a competitive service. According to a New York Times report in today’s Toronto Star, written by Richard Siklos and Bill Carter, NBC Universal, News Corp, Viacom and CBS are said to be meeting to build a better mousetrap, one they hope the viewing public will tune into instead of YouTube.

Though serious obstacles still stand in the way of success, executives from the firms mentioned in the article have been had a sense of urgency to their meetings since Google announced it would purchase YouTube for $1.65Billion in October 2006.

“…each partner in the proposed YouTube competitor brings its own agenda and potential conflicts. For instance, News Corp. also owns both the Fox television network and the popular MySpace social-networking Web site,” wrote Siklos and Carter.

Along with specific agendas, each of the corporations meeting currently have separate deals with Google. As an example, MySpace has an advertising and search deal with Google while CBS is in negotiations with Google surrounding the sale of radio advertising.

For most of the year, search engine optimization and marketing is a great industry to be in. Though the hours are long and the stress can be high, the opportunities for intellectual stimulation, challenge and growth are enormous. A career in search marketing is a full time job times two. Spiders never sleep and search engine results pages do not close for the holidays. That makes this time of year a bit different for SEOs and SEMs.

It’s been a tremendous year of change, challenge and diversity in the search marketing sector. Hopefully the tech world will find a little down time in the coming week. Unfortunately, for most techs in the search marketing world, downtime tends to mean five hour days instead of ten hour days.

It’s been a tremendous year of change, challenge and diversity in the search marketing sector. Hopefully the tech world will find a little down time in the coming week. Unfortunately, for most techs in the search marketing world, downtime tends to mean five hour days instead of ten hour days.

Richard Zwicky posted Enquisite’s search engine referral stats covering November and early December at the Enquisite blog the other day. According to Enquisite, Google was responsible for 78.21% of site traffic generated from search results. Competitors Yahoo and MSN trail far behind driving 5.94% and 3.67% of search referral traffic respectively.

Enquisite’s November 2006 data shows:



Just to be clear on the point, Google is seen to drive 78.21% of search referral traffic with Yahoo, MSN and AOL showing in the single digits. Poor Ask is seen to drive less than 1%!

Perhaps I spoke too soon?

DMOZ’s condition was upgraded late Monday from dead as a doornail to a situation resembling palliative care as ODP volunteers and AOL technicians managed to restore editing capabilities. According to a note on the Resource Zone forum,

UPDATE: December 18, 2006 — Editors have regained access to the editors server and the public pages are now up-to-date. However, the public ODP scripts (including site suggestion, update listing, editor application, and abuse reporting) are still not available and we currently have no ETA for their return. Please be patient and, again, we ask that you not start threads asking when those forms will be available again–we will update this announcement when we have further information.

Miracle Max was unavailable for comment.