Google Finds 1 Trillion Unique URL’s

In a blog post today Google says they’ve identified 1 trillion unique URLs on the web. It’s actually more, they say, but some web pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. [Read more]

Moneysupermarket.com Appoints New SEO Agency Efficient Frontier

Price comparison sites moneysupermarket.com and travelsupermarket.com have confirmed that their paid search engine marketing campaigns business has moved to Efficient Frontier. Efficient Frontier (EF) is based in California and has an office in London. EF replaces the website’s previous paid search incumbent The Search Works.

Chester/North Wales company MSM.com also works with digital agency TBG and Doner Cardwell Hawkins.

MSM.com’s latest reported traffic figures showed the company was currently attracting just shy of 100 million visitors.

The value of the paid SEO business has not been disclosed but the company did recently announce that its total spend on digital advertising and search would exceed £50m. The company also announced that it planned to increase the budget for its newspaper advertising campaigns.

Alan Harding, head of search at moneysupermarket.com, said: “Search is one of the most important channels for us to drive activity to our websites and Efficient Frontier will now work with our in-house team of search professionals to help us manage our complex search campaigns, which span many different industries.”

Google Share of Searches Almost 70 Percent

Google grabbed 69.17 percent of all U.S. searches for the four weeks ending June 28, 2008, Hitwise announced today. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.62, 5.46 and 4.17 percent respectively. The remaining 42 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.70 percent of U.S. searches.

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 5/31/ 2007, 4/26/08, 5/26/2007 from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

In the U.K. market, Google search properties (Google.co.uk and Google.com) accounted for 87 percent of all UK searches in June 2008 representing a 10 percent increase compared to June 2007. Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.00 percent of UK searches in June 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008. MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased two percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

In the Australia market, Google search accounted for 88 percent of all AU searches in June 2008 representing a 12 percent increase compared to June 2007. MSN search accounted for 7 percent and Yahoo! search accounted for 4.00 percent of AU searches in June 2008.

via searchenginewatch.com

Microsoft Slams Yahoo-Google Search Pact

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) says the proposed search advertising pact between Google (NSDQ:GOOG) and Yahoo (NSDQ:YHOO) will give Google an “unprecedented” amount of control over the online search advertising market, and Microsoft is urging U.S. antitrust regulators to scuttle the deal.Under terms of the June agreement, Google will provide Yahoo with access to its AdSense for search and AdSense for content advertising programs, and the two companies will also work to improve interoperability between their respective instant messaging technologies.

But in a Tuesday hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Antitrust and the House Judiciary Committee Antitrust Task Force, Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel, decried the potential impact of one company controlling up to 90 percent of the search advertising market.

“If search is the gateway (NYSE:GTW) to the Internet, and most believe that it is, this deal will put Google in a position to own that gateway and the information that flows through it,” Smith said in a statement.

Smith also noted that the $800 million in additional revenue that Yahoo claims the deal will generate will amount to “money out of the pockets of American businesses, big and small, who will pay higher prices for the very same ads they buy from Yahoo! today.”

Google’s stranglehold on the market would result in fewer choices and higher prices for online advertisers, and its ability to track users’ online search behavior could also create “significant” privacy issues, according to Smith.

Google insists that the deal would not boost Google’s search traffic, since Yahoo would run its own search and advertising programs. And since Google doesn’t set prices for advertisements, and allows advertisers to handle pricing through an auction system, the search giant says won’t have the ability to raise prices.

Updated content, keywords advised for SEO

Regularly updated content, relevant keywords and incoming links can be good starting points for marketers wishing to attract the attention of search engine crawlers, an expert has noted.

Writing on realbusiness.co.uk, entrepreneur Dawn Gibbins said that these are some of the most important site features that crawlers - also known as spiders - look at when collecting information for engines such as Yahoo! and Google.

A news section that has articles added to it at least once a month can be helpful, as can submitting links to online directories and making good use of both long tail and popular keywords and phrases, she advised.

“The first terms that spring to mind may not be the most useful,” Ms Gibbins stated.

“Rather than single words, it can be much more effective to weave whole phrases through your site. These are known as long tail search terms.”

According to the Search Engine Roundtable blog, web users appear to be searching less for short tail keywords - the most obvious search terms - and more for long tail keywords.

via epiphanysolutions.co.uk

SEO ‘Holes’ Eradicated Prior to Kontraband 2.0

Two years in the making Kontraband launches a web 2.0 version of it’s site. Construkt discovered and removed some SEO ‘holes’ that the site had.