SEO Blog

Victoria BC is known to be a hotbed of search related activities. Several of the original and/or best known search engine marketers live on southern Vancouver Island and Victoria is home to a growing number of search and social media applications such as Enquisite Search Metrics and the Flock social media browser.

Earlier today, Google announced the winners of the annual Anita Borg academic scholarships awarded to outstanding female leaders in technology. University of Victoria Ph.D. student Celina Gibbs was one of four Canadian women to achieve the scholarship.

Google established the scholarship program in 2003 to honour the groundbreaking work of Dr. Anita Borg, an early computer scientist who dedicated herself to increasing the participation of women in technology. 2008 is the first year women in Canadian universities could apply. The award is also now open to female computer science students in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

Congratulations Celina.

An interesting report from the Kelsey Group predicts the interactive classified advertising market will grow from its current $3.9Billion spend to over $14.7Billion by 2010. Advancing at a phenomenal 30.5% compounded annual growth rate, the increase in ad-spend will come primarily from traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television. A radical increase in online advertising dollars is not extraordinary news to the search marketing community. We’ve sensed and benefited from this shift in the sensibilities of advertisers for several years now.

What might be a surprise to many search marketers are the exact directions that increased ad-spending is likely to go in. According to the report, much of that money will be focused on highly vertical markets such as home services, home and garden care, health care, legal, finance and auto repair. Because items or inventory from each of these vertical sectors tend to have specific search tools or sections of larger search engines dedicated to them, search results from those categories might soon be found faster amd more easily “off-Google” than at-Google.

To quote search journalist Michelle Greer, “Apparently, some online advertisers are realizing that having ads on the 60th page of a Google keyword search isn’t exactly fruitful.” This is a scenario in which Google becomes its own worst enemy, leading searchers and advertisers to focus their attentions elsewhere.

Though I am not allowed to say exactly when or remotely where, I will be spending some quality time with members of the Google and Microsoft Live Webmaster Central teams this weekend.

Somewhere in America the Webmaster Central teams from Google and Microsoft Live will face each other head to head in quasi-athletic competition. The rival search-squads will be squaring off in public against each other in one of the few forums their extraordinary NDA’s don’t overtly restrict; on a curling rink. Yes, you read that right, a curling rink. Geeks on ice with brooms, rings and rocks. The event is obviously going to be sillier than an algo-update at Christmas time. Being Canadian (and thus having an understanding of such things at birth), I’ve been asked to provide color commentary for WebmasterRadio.FM.

Figuring that much of the WebmasterRadio.FM audience and most of Metamend’s readers have little interest in curling, I want to use the opportunity to ask smart questions to some of the smartest people in search, the ones who actually run the engines.

Starting today, I am compiling a list of questions from the community. If you have anything you want asked, (expect full credit on the air), please let me know in the comments section here.

On Monday, the 11th circuit U.S. Appeals Court upheld an earlier verdict that says the use of trademarked terms in a meta-description tag can create confusion and thus be considered a trademark infringement.

The suit was filed by North American Medical Corp. (NAM) and Adagen Medical International against Axiom Worldwide Inc. and is known as North American Medial Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc.

NAM and Axiom compete against each other making and selling spinal decompression devices. The case revolves around the #2 placement Axiom achieved at Google under trademarked terms belonging to NAM, “Accu-Spina” and “IDD Therapy”. Those terms happen to be found in Axiom’s meta-description tag and are included in the descriptive-text that appeared under links in Google’s search results.

The decision rested on the court’s understanding (or misunderstanding) of how Google’s ranking algorithms operate with the plaintiff suggesting the defendant’s use of of their trademarks in their description tag was the reason the defendant’s website was pushed to the #2 position.

As pointed out by Eric Goldman who originally covered the story in his Technology and Marketing Law Blog,