SEO Blog

Metamend Search Marketing recently introduced a Reputation Management service headed by industry veteran David Howell. After working in the search industry for as long as we have, the enormity and scope of Reputation Management issues faced by businesses and individuals has long been apparent. A study released yesterday shows the importance of understanding and controlling your online reputation.

72% of social media users will research a company’s customer service reputation before doing business with that company. According to a consumer survey conducted by the Society for New Communications Research, “… affluent consumers are using social media channels to share their personal customer service experiences and learn about others’ care experiences when making purchase decisions.”

The survey, which was sponsored by professional speech and imaging service provider Nuance Communications, found that:

• 59.1% of respondents use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience
• 72.2% of respondents research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
• 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company
• 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online

All eyes on on Yahoo! this afternoon as they are preparing to release their Q1-2008 report at 2PM pacific (about 45-minutes from now). This report is the most important one in the company’s fourteen year history as it will dictate the terms of Microsoft’s hostile take-over bid and the future of one of the oldest and most identifiable online brands.

Yahoo! shares have stayed fairly stable throughout the day, trading in the mid $28 range, suggesting investors are not dumping the stock in anticipation of a poor showing. At the same time, it should be noted that Yahoo! share prices have not peaked above the $31-dollar per share offer Microsoft put on the table, which suggests The Street feels Microsoft has made a fair offer.

If Yahoo! shows strong results from the first three months of 2008, the take-over attempt by Microsoft will be that much harder. If, however, Yahoo!’s numbers are weak, especially in the face of Google’s excellent report last week, the Microsoft bid will almost certainly become a reality.
We’ll just have to wait a few more minutes to see what develops. Stay tuned…

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,

The shock has worn off. To be honest, it didn’t last as long as I’d hoped it would. The truth is, Ask’s death doesn’t make much of a material difference to Metamend or any other SEO firm for that matter. We might have been very good friends but this is a business environment after all.

We never really did a lot of business on Ask. Our clients haven’t considered their placement on Ask critical and, for the most part, neither have we. Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft have always driven far larger numbers of website visitors, making Ask a fourth-place second thought sort of address. For most of us, Ask never really mattered, at least not in a financial sense.

Nevertheless, most people in the search marketing community literally loved Ask.com/. We loved former CEO Jim Lanzone. We loved evangelist Gary Price. We loved hanging out with Patrick Crisp and the hilarious characters from the PR department.

Most of all, we loved what Ask had become and we watched as other search engines innovated on Ask’s ideas. Ask inspired all of us. That’s why it was included in the “Big4″, even though its market-share was consistently lower than AOL’s. The emotional outpouring of Ask obits is indicitive of how much the SEO community loved what was “the little engine that should”. Here are seven reasons we’ll miss Ask: