This week Amit Singhal, who led development of real-time search at Google, gave us a little insight into how Google is ranking tweets as a part of their real-time search efforts.

Tweets are a main component of Google’s real-time search results, but up until now there was very little information available about the algorithm used to rank these microblog posts.  One factor of their ranking doesn’t really surprise those in the SEO industry, as it is similar to Google’s PageRank technology used for websites in traditional search. Basically, Google judges the value of a website by looking at it’s link structure – how many links on the web are pointing to the site, and the number of pages linking to those linkers. The same is true for their ranking of tweets, just replace the word ‘link’ in the previous sentence with the word ‘follower’. Of course, quality comes into play as well – the better the reputation of any given follower, the better your reputation is as well.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says.

He’s quick to point out it is not a popularity contest, but it sure seems that way. Granted, judging number of followers may seem a good indicator of the level of clout one person has, but this model doesn’t take into account ‘tweet’ of originality. Say a small time reporter breaks a big story and tweets about it from their personal account, and then CNN tweets it from theirs – CNN will get the credit, while the reporter responsible for the news gets lost in the shuffle. Also, social media is a different ballgame than traditional websites, and using this rank method may not transfer well. If I place a link on my website to another page it is a very clear sign that I do, in fact, endorse that page – which may not be the case for all the people I follow. For example, I may follow competitors to keep track of my industry when I would never link to their site directly. Hopefully as real-time search develops Google will come up with a better way to deal with the Twitter account reputation factor.

Google has also developed a way to determine which tweets should show up for more common terms, such as celebrity names or current event keywords. The idea being to weed out spam and low quality tweeting from appearing in the results.  A common practice on twitter is to include  hashtags – basically the # sign following by the topic keyword. It’s a great way of keeping tweets about the same topic connected, and to get your tweet seen by those following the conversation. Unfortunately the practice that began as a useful organizational idea has been abused by spammers, and Google has determined it could be a red-flag marker of lower quality tweets.

Also, Google is scanning to find the “signal in the noise” to help sort through the tweets from different sources and viewpoints to determine the most up to the minute, relevant tweets for these popular terms.  They are essentially looking for a sudden influx of similar tweets, for example tweets that mention ‘hospital’ along with ‘Lady GaGa’,  and consider that evidence that the particular event mentioned is most relevant.

While real-time search encompasses many things and Google has intentions to continue refining their real-time results, Twitter updates are currently a major component. It’s nice to have the ranking factors those in SEM assumed were affecting tweet placement confirmed by the source.

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

That’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said when responding to concerns raised about internet privacy and recent updates to the search engine.  The comment created a mini firestorm, with internet industry blogs and forums lighting up in discussion…  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Over the last couple of weeks Google has made quite a few announcements that are rapidly changing the game for users and search marketers alike – and they are doing so pretty much under the radar.

The most noticeable change for the average user was Google’s inclusion of Real-time Search, currently in the form of “relevant” tweets.  You can read Google’s official announcement for the basics, the general idea being that users can now get an idea of what is happening right this second in regard to any given subject.  Seems like a good idea in theory, but check out this post from Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media for a surprisingly scary look into how Google’s solution could go very very wrong.

The second change was the universal roll out of personalized search.  Until very recently, Google returned pretty much the same results for everyone. Meaning, if user A ran a query and user B ran the same query, they would get back the same results. This simply isn’t the case anymore. Again, I’ll point to Google’s official announcement of this to explain how it works. In a nutshell, Google now keeps track of your search history (for 180 days) and uses that to customize your results, whether you are logged in or not.  Sort of makes you view Eric Schmidt’s glib comment about internet privacy in a whole new light.

Now, personalized search results are not new. They were available previously as an opt-in service for those users with a Google account, this change makes personalized results the norm for every user, or, opt-out.  The problem with this is that the only mention of this change was a blog post, the one I pointed to above…that’s it. No space on the search pages announcing the change, no easily identifiable opt-out button, nothing.  A user would have to spot the ‘View Customizations’ link, or the ‘Web History’ link up at the top to realize that tracking is being used to customize – neither are particularly visible, and the average user won’t be that clued in. To me, and to many others in the industry blogging about these changes, it seems a little too ‘Big Brother’.

So what does all this mean for your SEO campaigns?

Rest assured, the ‘normal’ search results are dead.  For better or worse, the way Google handled this announcement ensures that very few users will opt-out of personalized results. However, the reality of the situation is that ‘normal’ results have been dying for a while now, and many of us saw these changes coming in one form or another.

The main strategies of your SEO campaigns won’t drastically change. At least in the beginning, there will still be tons of queries that return ‘normal’ results – until Google gathers enough data for users to personalize them.  Even when results are personalized, Google will still use their algorithm to rank those sites, and you’ll want to optimize so you have a chance of getting that top spot for any user.  First impressions are now more critical than ever, as the more a user clicks on your site from their results, the more likely it is you’ll jump to the top of that list.

There’s a lot of debate right now about whether these changes have Google moving down a dangerous path. In response to the privacy issue Mozilla’s Director of Community Development put up a blog post inviting users to switch to Bing.  It’s a big deal.  But it can be (and has been) argued that Google has a monopoly on the search industry, and as such I don’t see many users jumping ship because of these changes – especially when you consider the fact many won’t know about them.

A few weeks ago Google Analytics became even more useful.  Instead of a measly 4 goals, webmasters are now allowed to track up to 20. It’s a given that you can probably think of more than 4 things you’d like people to do when they visit your site, now you can track and access that data without creating multiple profiles and switching back and forth. It’s welcome news to say the least.

There’s really no excuse for not having goal tracking set up within your analytics account. It’s essential to know how your SEO strategies are improving your site’s overall performance and your online marketing ROI. Setting up goals will allow you to judge this, not just by visits, but by the actions those visitors take.

Each profile in your account can have up to four “goal sets”, each of these sets can contain up to five goals.  In addition to the standard URL destination goal, analytics now has the option to track engagement goals – such as time on site and pages per visit.

URL Destination Goal Tracking

This type of goal is used when you want to know how many visitors came to a specific page on your site.  Webmasters can use this method for something as simple as keeping track of how many people visited a blog page.  It can also be used to track form submissions or registrations by entering the ‘thank you’ or confirmation page as the URL goal. When you set up a URL destination goal you have a choice between 3 different ‘Goal Types’, also known as ‘match types’. The type of goal that is appropriate will vary based on how your website is built and the page you are interested in tracking. Here’s a basic breakdown to help you decide which type is best for your goal:
Exact Match – to use this type of goal the URL entered as your goal must match the URL shown in the reports exactly. For example, if you want to track the page www.mysite/contact-us_thank-you.html, you need to enter /contact-us_thank-you.html as your goal.
Head Match – use this type of goal when the URL is the same for this step of the goal, but is followed by unique session or user identifiers.  Enter the URL but leave out the unique values. For example, if you want to track www.mysite.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=528, but the ‘id’ changes for each user, just enter ‘//checkout.cgi?page=1′. This will cause the goal to be counted no matter what id number is assigned.
Regular Expression Match – use this type to match your URLs. This is useful when the url is dynamically generated and can vary between users. For example, if a user could be coming from one of many subdomains, and your URLs use session identifiers, use regular expressions to define the constant element of your URL. For instance, ‘page=1′ will match ’sports.mysite.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002,’ and ‘football.mysite.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=19.‘

Time on Site Goal Tracking

A new goal available in Analytics is the Time on Site goal. This allows webmasters to create goals based on how long users stay on their site using hours, minutes and/or seconds.  For example, if you notice that visitors tend to become customers if they spend more than 5 minutes on the site, it may be worth keeping data on those visits that last. In this case you would simply select ‘Time on Site’ as the Goal Type and select greater than 5 minutes as the goal. You can also track visits that last less than a determined length of time.

Pages per Visit Goal Tracking

The pages per visit goal allows webmasters to keep track of visits that browse through a specific number of pages. Also known as ‘depth of visit’, this information can be valuable when determining how engaging your site is. Options of ‘more than’, ‘equal to’ or ‘less than’ a number of visits are available so you can completely customize how you’d like to use this goal.

While the data for these engagement goals has been available in Analytics for quite some time it’s nice to be able to set them up as goals and gain the ability to analyze it further. Obviously this is just a basic overview – there are many way to customize and break down your goal data, such as using filters, funnels, advanced segments and custom reporting. Google Analytics is a wonderful (not to mention free!) tool, stay tuned to the Stone blog for more tips, tricks and updates on using the program wisely down the road.

image from here

Bing has been very visible at SES and other conferences to promote their new search engine and it’s webmaster tools functions. Is this clip from SES’s You Tube Channel, Alessandro Catorcini and Rajesh Srivastav, both of Bing, discuss Bing’s search engine usability with John Mulligan, SEO-PR at SES San Jose 2009.

They also discuss Bing’s API which is open to everyone to use at  http://www.bing.com/developers.  Just simply register for their application ID tp begin using all of Bing’s products to call its API.

They also point out that Bing has features such as the outbound and backlink functionality not found  in other search engine webmaster tools.

Here is the video:

Google announced a change to its search infrastructure and is calling the change “Google Caffeine.” Implying faster web results, the objectives of the next generation of Google were revealed in a Google Webmaster Central Blog post last month.

Three words are very prominent in the post:

1. CRAWL

2. INDEX

3. RANK

Google wants to do these three things ”as quickly as possible.”

Caffeine is coming on the heels of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine which has a knack for reporting news very quickly.   Not to be outdone, Google has created Caffeine to bring more relevant results to the search rankings faster.

Not only does Google want to be quicker on the draw, Google wants to be more efficient.   A recent New York Times article on job opportunities in statistics mentioned a Googler who had worked on a new Google algorithm model that “increased the chances that the crawler would scan frequently updated web pages and make fewer trips to more static ones.”

For search engine optimization, Caffeine certainly places more emphasis on marketers to keep their content updated and fresh.

comScore, Inc. has released their monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the United States search marketplace. In August 2009, Americans conducted more than 13.9 billion core searches, with Google accounting for 64.6 percent search market share. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.3 percent market share, a 0.4-percentage point gain versus July 2009.

Google led the U.S. core search market in August 2009 with 64.6 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! (19.3 percent), and Microsoft (9.3 percent). Ask Network captured 3.9 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 3.0 percent.

Aug-09 vs.
Core Search Entity           Jul-09        Aug-09          Jul-09
——————           ——        ——          ——
Total Core Search             100.0%        100.0%        N/A
—————–            —–          —–            —-
Google Sites                         64.7%            64.6%         -0.1
————                  —-           —-            —-
Yahoo! Sites                          19.3%          19.3%            0.0
————                  —-           —-             —
Microsoft Sites                      8.9%             9.3%             0.4
—————                —            —             —
Ask Network                          3.9%             3.9%            0.0
———–                    —            —             —
AOL LLC Network                3.1%           3.0%              -0.1
—————                —            —            —-

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and
cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and
user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five
search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

You can read the full release here.

Yahoo announced the launch of their new and improved search format yesterday, you can read the official release here.   These changes were no doubt sparked by the recent partnership with MSN and Bing.

The previous changes introduced by Yahoo included a new Yahoo! homepage, improved Yahoo! Mail, high-quality video calling in Yahoo! Messenger, and a suite of new Yahoo! Mobile experiences.

Here are some key features of the new Yahoo Search page design:

• Feature-Rich Experience – This is meant for having a quick access to search features such as Search Scan/SafeSearch that help the users protect you from viruses, spyware and spam. Hence, it will be easier for people to the research documents that they have created during searching.

• Search Assist Expansion – This new design of the page will help the visitors use query assistance that is available directly below the search box. It has also been given on the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. For further assistance, Yahoo has added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

• Intelligent Search Results – This feature allows the users to explore results from sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. In the past few months, it has been seen that some more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With this new search page design, Yahoo claims that they have made it easier for the users to experience rich results from an increasing number of sites.

The new Yahoo Search page design not only makes search easier but also has an improved Page load and Perceived load times with a better inline data URI Images.

See the video below for in-depth info on the features.

Courtesy Yahoo Search Blog

Google made historic news yesterday by declaring they do not use the meta keywords tag. Okay, I am being sarcastic.  Google hasn’t used the meta keywords tag for a long time and any “SEO” should know that.   So why did Google blog about this, on the record?  At least two reasons, (1) people continue to sue over it by claiming copyright infringement and people confuse the meta keywords with the meta description, which Google does recommend to use.

So there are official posts from Matt Cutts, the Google Blog and Search Engine Land trying to erase any confusion from people who are new to this space.

If you want to know which meta tags Google does pay attention to, see this FAQ. Plus, Google’s JohnMu tweeted that Google also does “not adhere to the “revisit-after” meta tag,” if you wanted to know.

Finally, here is a video if you don’t want to read any of this:

Google’s Matt Cutts talks about the link issues that webmasters should be aware of now that Google is improving it’s crawling of Java Script links:

Google is warning webmasters about duplicate content and various site issues.  A few months back, Google explained the multiple pros and cons of duplicacy in the content and the related issues showing their concern over it.

The Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issue was a hot topic at last month’s Search Engine Strategies  conference in San Jose. Google has reproduced the talk on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel.

A great discussion thread on Webmaster World regarding their poll that ran last week asking Would You Allow Google to Manage Your AdWords Account? To a seasoned PPC manager, the results were not surprising.  An overwhelming majority of the responses were basically, “no way!”  In short, readers feel that the Google AdWords representatives who manage accounts for big and small advertisers cannot do as good a job as an SEM company or someone who manages it themselves.   There are many stories in the thread, mostly negative about their experience with having Google manage their account.

Just take a look at the pie chart, 87% said no, they would not allow Google to manage their AdWords campaigns. That is out of 150 Webmaster World reader responses.

The other responses said that they would allow Google do the set up of the initial campaign but then take it over from that point going forward.  That really means, no, they won’t allow Google to manage their campaign.

To take a step back, Google has a large stable of staffers just down the street from our office ready to help you set up and continue to maintain your Google AdWords account.   And they do it for free. The issue is, at least according to the stories in the thread, they don’t manage the accounts as effectively or as smart as you would yourself or as a professional PPC management company. At least, those are the overwhelming opinions in the thread.

Google can’t take the time to truly learn and understand an individual marketers business.  That is why there are so many advantages to working with a local SEM resource.

Just remember, “Free” is not always a good investment.

Bing has created a new feature called Ad Preview in order to help advertisers see if their ad is appearing in Bing.  Now, instead of searching on Bing.com for an ad, the advertisers will be able to access Ad Preview directly in adCenter to manage their advertising campaigns.  Ad Preview will also help people avoid the unnecessary impressions and accidental clicks that they might come across during a search for their ad.

If advertisers find their ads showing in Ad Preview, but not in the regular search then it means that they might have set demographic or geographic targets that they themselves do fulfill.   However, Ad Preview does not offer a geographic or demographic preview right now.  Bing says this is being addressed and should be available soon.

Microsoft says that Bing continues to see  strong growth since it introduced Bing on the market and killed off Live Search completely.  According to Microsoft the number of unique users that ran queries in the decision search engine has increased by over 8% from July to August.   It is important to note that, in parallel with the launch of Bing, Microsoft has also been running an advertising campaign with an estimated cost of up to $100 million.

Here are the steps to use to use AdPreview:

1. Sign in to Microsoft adCenter.

2. Select your account.

3. Click the Campaigns tab.

4. On the Campaigns page, at the upper right, click Ad Preview Tool.

5. In the Keyword box, type a keyword that’s associated with your ad.

6. Click the Preview Ads button. Please note that you might get one of these security messages:

• If you get the message Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely, click No to proceed.
• If you get the message This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, click Yes to proceed.

7. View your ad results.

Search Engine Strategies San Jose just wrapped up last week, and the SES Conference Channel on You Tube has over 20 videos posted from the event.  Great stuff for all marketers.  One segment I really enjoyed was Brian Fetherstonhaugh, Chairman and CEO of Ogilvy One, discussion with John Mulligan of SEO-PR how external marketing agencies and in-house marketers have to be their own advocates to sell a search marketing strategy.  Those of us in the interactive agency world know all about the challenges that Brian mentions in hte interview.  Check it out:

Back in 2007, Yahoo’s MyYahoo startpage was the first to let its users check their email accounts, including GMail, via Yahoo Mail.  This was a smart move on their part because at the time it helped curb user attrition to Google via GMail dependence.  Google then followed suit last year and allowed Gmail users the chance to not only check other email accounts, but even send email through their Gmail interface as long as the other email account did not require SMTP authentication.

Google is using similar aggregation tactics, with its video search for example; it’s more efficient to search for You Tube or Meta Cafe videos on Google than on the sites themselves.  And with the new Google Wave project (beta), Google looks to be the central place to communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Their is no comparison with Yahoo for Google’s tools and application efforts, like Wave.  Google continues to  make their API code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to build more unique tools.  One recent example is Tweety,  which signs into your Twitter account and lets you fetch your Twitter timeline and post tweets from Google Wave.

If that wasn’t enough, Google Sites accounted for nearly 90 percent of the 21 percent growth in search query volume from the previous year on the five core search engines.  This accounts for much of  AdWords dominance in Paid Search.

So, what does Yahoo still do better than Google?  Here’s a roundup:

1. Yahoo Finance
2. Yahoo Answers : Q&A
3. Backlink Reporting via Yahoo Site Explorer: Even with the improvements in Google Webmaster Tools
4. Flickr : Photo Uploading & Sharing
5. Local Search : Still too tough to update Google Local Business Center listings
6. Entertainment
7. Privacy

Can you think of anything else Yahoo does better than Google?

PS:  As of 12 noon today, Yahoo Finance showed Google stock trading at $469.05.  A 51% increase YTD.  Yahoo is at $15.02, which is just a 20% increase YTD.

This week,  Google brought out the final fact in their  Quality Score series.   The facts are great resource for both marketers and agencies executing AdWords campaigns.

Here is the official post courtesy of  Dan Friedman,  Google Product Marketing Manager:

Quality is given extra consideration when determining which ads appear in the top positions. For ad placement in top positions above Google search results, we use the same Ad Rank formula as we do for all other search ads, based on your Quality Score and CPC bid. However, in order to ensure that the highest-quality ads show above search results, only ads that exceed a certain Quality Score and CPC bid threshold are eligible to appear in these positions. The CPC bid threshold for these positions is determined by the matched keyword’s Quality Score; the higher Quality Score, the lower the CPC threshold.

Keep in mind Google Ads are positioned on search and content pages based on their Ad Rank.  The ad with the highest Ad Rank appears in the first position, and so on down the page.  The CPC bid threshold is determined by the matched keyword’s Quality Score; the higher Quality Score, the lower the CPC threshold.

As most of you know, up to three AdWords ads are eligible to appear above the search results (as opposed to on the side). Only ads that exceed a certain Quality Score and CPC bid threshold may appear in these positions. If the three highest-ranked ads all surpass these thresholds, then they’ll appear in order above the search results. If one or more of these ads don’t meet the thresholds, then the next highest-ranked ad that does will be allowed to show above the search results.

The formula is as follows:

Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

From Google’s official AdWords help content:

The Quality Score for Ad Rank on Google and the search network is determined by:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; if the ad is appearing on a search network page, its CTR on that search network partner is also considered
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• Other relevance factors

Make sense?

Most people haven’t noticed but Google recently tweaked their AdWords so that they appear closer to the organic and map listings.

Based on the changes, it’s probably safe to say that Google is testing the efficacy of the new ads. Do they produce more clicks? Do they produce more quality clicks?

There’s an interesting comparison to be made to Bing in this regard: when research firm User Centric performed an eye tracking study comparing Bing to Google back in June, it found that Bing’s sponsored search results on the right side of the page caught the attention of 42% of the participants while AdWords ads on the right side of Google SERPs only caught the attention of 25% of the participants.

While one of the reasons for this may be that Bing is new and users haven’t had time to develop the same level of ad blindness they have with AdWords, User Centric found that ads above the organic search results above Bing and Google received a similar amount of attention, hinting that ad blindness wasn’t all there is to it. You’ll notice that when it comes to the ads on the right-hand side of the page, Bing’s ads are placed much closer to the organic search results than are Google’s. Therefore it seems logical that the proximity does play some role here.

Given that Google generates billions of dollars in revenue each quarter from AdWords, if Google’s experimentation with AdWords placement proves effective, the impact could be quite significant.

There are numerous coding errors or omissions that can adversely affect the way the bot collects information about a site.   We will review a couple coding errors  in this post.  First, the meta data:

• Missing, empty, or duplicate <title> tag
• Missing, empty, or duplicate <meta> description tag
• Missing, empty, or duplicate <h1> tag

These tags are key locations in the page for using keywords and key phrases to associate for relevance with your content. The <title> tag is required in HTML and XHTML documents, and the other two might as well be (all of them are very strategic for SEO). Each one is to be used only once per page, and all must have text (no images or just blank spaces!) between the tags. That text in those locations is considered important keyword text by the bot (for it defines the content of the page), so make the most of it. Don’t duplicate text strings between these tags, either. That’s a wasted opportunity for defining more keywords.

What about 302 redirects?  We talked about 301 redirects in previous posts, and how to strategically use them. 302s are only temporary redirects, and unlike with 301s, no link juice credit is passed to the redirected page. Using a 302 redirect is not a coding error per se, but much of the time it is a strategic error from the perspective of SEO. Unless you have a genuinely temporary need to redirect a page, stick with 301s as an SEO best practice.

Watch for more tips in future posts.

(AdAge, 4/27/2009)

Coke has recently announced that it will push the advertising industry to adopt value based pricing models as a standard practice. And, this call-to-action is likely to force a change in SEO and online marketing pricing models quickly.

The argument made by Coke, and supported by other heavy hitting advertisers like Anheuser-Busch and Procter & Gamble, is that effort doesn’t necessarily equate to value. Even companies with marketing budgets in the billions want to see maximum return for each dollar spent, and they don’t want to pay for anything short of success. Is the economy forcing the marketing and advertising industry into a new era of accountability?

Let’s look at how Coke is breaking from their old advertising compensation methods:

“BEFORE: Agencies and Coke negotiate in advance how much profit the former will see on a given project.

AFTER: Agency is guaranteed only recouped costs, with any profit coming only if certain targets are met.

BEFORE: Agency decides what Coke should pay for a project based on the time it expects to expend on it.

AFTER: Coke tells agencies how valuable a project is based on strategic importance, whether other agencies could deliver the same outcome, and other factors.”

Coke’s agencies include some of the most creative in the media and agency worlds, including Wieden & Kennedy, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Starcom MediaVest Group and Mother, among dozens of others. Some agency executives, speaking privately, said they couldn’t argue with the theory behind the shift, but had concerns about how it might work in practice.

Read the entire AdAge article here.

One of the early promises of the internet was that national marketers would be able to target on a local level with greater precision (not to mention with interactivity featuring sight, sound and motion) than existing offline media such as community newspapers, radio stations, direct mail, telemarketing and, in larger markets, local TV.

The newspaper model of advertising is almost gone due to declining readership and shuttering of daily papers.  In mid-July the Ann Arbor News ceased daily publication, though a smaller staffed web site and twice weekly print product will remain.  The Seattle Post Intelligencer published their last edition in March.  The company, however, said it would maintain seattlepi.com, making it the nation’s largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.

Network and local TV has seen viewership loss to cable, streaming video sites like Hulu.

Radio listeners have also turned to the web and satellite radio.

Direct mail and telemarketing?  Good luck with those in this environment.  Here is a chart from IAB:

What about local blogs?  There are millions of blogs out there, but which ones can deliver results for an advertiser?  How do you get a decent audience?  Most blog sites have no salespeople to deal with and getting an ad buy can be painfully long process.    Amagalmating ad buys across a series of blog sites can be an even bigger pain, but you almost have to do it to get a decent sized audience.

The most reliable way for national marketers to deliver messages into local markets is through local market websites (or the localized content sections of the portals, such as weather). If you think about the local sites in your area, many of them are poorly trafficked blogs or community/municipality sites that give you information about parks, schools and the library.  The sites that really get traction are companion sites to local media properties: radio, newspaper (i.e. www.annarbor.com, www.mlive.com, etc.), TV stations.

This, then, is the reason why ad networks that specialize in helping national advertisers target locally have grown up by aggregating numerous local media sites. If you have the ability to sell some inventory for a couple of local TV stations and radio stations and the newspaper, you can deliver an audience that is pretty reliably local.

Publishers realize the problem too.  AOL and Citysearch signed local content and advertising pacts in February.    Companies like ZEvents are now getting inventory from their local event partners so advertisers can access all of their local brand sites.

If you’re a national or regional marketer, then you’re familiar with the concept of media fragmentation, or the continued splintering of target audiences as they move away from a handful of large media publishers/sites towards many smaller, niche ones.  It makes finding and communicating with your audiences a lot harder, as the number of media outlets through which to reach them has grown exponentially.   You may want to consider Ad Networks.

There is a brand new Google Webmaster Tools error for Sitemaps files. The new error or warning is named “Duplicate URL” and has been springing up for many webmasters recently.

The first reports of such an error being received by webmasters was on June 29th, Wednesday. The error basically tells the webmaster that they have the same URL (a duplicate) listed in the Sitemap file and they should probably remove it. In some cases, Google is wrong about what is duplicate and what is not. For example, if domain.com/page/ is technically a different page from domain.com/page/index.html, Google will still consider that a duplicate listing.

John Mu from Google has an explanation:

“This is a new warning message we added to inform you of this issue. This does not mean that we treat your Sitemap file in any way differently, it’s just for your information (and this information wasn’t shown to users before). In general, it makes little sense to submit duplicate URLs in a Sitemap file, which is why this message was added.

There is one item which may lead to confusion here though – Google’s Sitemaps processing generally simplifies URLs in ways that make sense on a whole. This includes removing “/index.html” from the URL if that’s the last part. In general, that makes sense, since you want to show users the relevant part of the URL (and since most servers will automatically check “index.html” when the root page is requested).

However, there are some cases where “/index.html” is a relevant part of the URL and can’t be removed. In these cases, we’ll generally discover those URLs through our normal web-crawl. At the moment, it’s possible that our Sitemaps processing will show these warnings in those cases – but since this does not signal any change in the processing of your Sitemaps files, you can safely ignore these warnings.

In short: these warnings are new, but the processing of your Sitemaps files has not changed.”