Bloggasm

So you know Mark Cuban? The billionaire who is being considered to join the Yahoo board?

Well he just came out with the fucking dumbest grand idea on how Yahoo can beat Google: Pay the most popular sites on the internet $1 million each to remove themselves from the Google index.

So what happens after Google just decides to get rid of “no-follow” tags and no longer gives you a choice whether to be indexed? There goes $1 billion! And do you really think that the New York Times and CNN will give up their biggest traffic source for a lousy $1 million, giving their competitors a huge edge?

Everyone working at Yahoo probably has palm prints on their foreheads after reading Cuban’s post and watching their future careers go down the drain.

Uh oh. If the figures published by Techcrunch are correct, then Digg has a lot more serious competitor than Reddit. It turns out that a Digg-style feature called Yahoo Buzz sends more than 20 times the traffic than a Digg-linked story.

The problem is, there isn’t a small website out there that could handle that kind of traffic — I wonder if that can be a negative for Yahoo because it limits its news sources. The one time this website made it to the front page of Digg (it has since been banned for some reason, or at least it was last time I checked), I got 40,000 visitors. My servers could barely stand it. Bloggasm would be toast under the weight of a million hits.

1.eBay Quietly Unveils New Classifieds Site For U.S: “Online auction powerhouse eBay is hoping you might want to advertise online, on its new site meant to rival the popular Craigslist. The Wall Street Journal says the U.S. version of the site, called Kijiji, has gone live.” EDITOR’S NOTE: Kijiji? WTF? Could they have found a more inane, hard-to-remember title for the website?

2. Voting Begins on USAToday.com For Simpsons’ Hometown: “Voting began today on the Web site of the USA Today newspaper for which of several Springfields will host the premiere of ‘The Simpsons Movie’ later this month.”

3. Gay Paper ‘Out & About’ Now Back In At Nashville Kroger Stores : “One month after Out & About Newspaper was removed from racks inside Nashville, Tenn.-area Kroger supermarkets, the regional gay and lesbian free weekly is coming back to some of the stores. In an announcement Monday, Kroger said DistribuTech, the free newspaper distribution company, had misinterpreted the supermarket chain’s policy against displaying free papers that promote specific religious, political or other agendas.”

4. Personal Traffic Alerts, With Made-to-Order Data: “For many people, getting away for a holiday means sitting in traffic while listening to staccato radio reports about rubbernecking delays and cascading backups. But during the next few days, as Americans extend their Fourth of July celebrations, tens of thousands of motorists around the country will receive up-to-the minute accident alerts and guidance on end runs around bottlenecks — without ever having to turn on a car radio.”

5. Can She Turn Yahoo Into, Well, Google?: A profile of Susan L. Decker, president of Yahoo.

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2. Even gay princes aren’t safe
3. The case of the mystery gadget
4. Why is Technorati so unreliable?
5. PR companies stalking journalists
6. The text-advertising wars
7. Journalists trying to investigate Chinese businesses

Some quick links to news items about the advertising industry:

Yahoo Combines Search And Display Ad Sales: “Yahoo is combining its search and display advertising sales teams in the U.S. and appointed David Karnstedt to oversee the new unit.”

Readers Try To Get Deal — Based on 50-Year-Old Ad: “Some readers of Fargo’s daily newspaper thought they could get a good deal on getting some blankets cleaned. But it turned out the ad from Fargo’s Finest Coin Laundry was fifty years old.”

‘NYT’ Introduces Co-branded Monster Job Site: “The New York Times launched its co-branded job site with Monster.com today. The new site combines the Times existing job listings in addition to Monster’s postings, tools, and content.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: I tried to use sites like Monster and Career Builder last August, with terrible results. The sites try to act too much like middle-men. They make it difficult to contact the company directly in most cases. And don’t even get me started on Craigslist. Because the barrier for entry is low (aka free), job placement and temp agencies spam the job boards with misleading ads trying to collect resumes so they can make a quick buck off your hiring.

In early 2005, over 20 book bloggers banded together to use their combined forces to promote good books that weren’t widely known. This group, called the Litblog Co-op, chooses four books a year — one for each season — and then writes extensively about them on their group blog located at http://lbc.typepad.com/blog/. Since they first started, they’ve managed to get over 1,300 links from bloggers and have a Google Page Rank of 6:

Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to go research the Co-op for an article I was going to write, only to find out that they’ve for some reason been blacklisted from Google and other major search engines.

Anyone who has even a basic understanding of Page Rank and Web Rank would know that with over 1,000 incoming links, many of them with the anchor text of the words “Litblog Co-op,” Googling those words should easily bring you directly to the site. However, when you type “Litblog Co-op” into Google, not only is it not the first result, it doesn’t even show up on the first page.

Confused, I dug deeper into this to try and find out why the correct results weren’t showing up. First, I searched for “Litblog Co-op” on MSN and Yahoo, and as you can see, I got the correct results. Next I searched for it at AOL and Ask.com — both of which use Google software — only to find that they, too, weren’t giving up the correct results.

After this startling discovery, I dug even deeper, only to find out that Google isn’t even indexing the site at all. I unearthed this by searching for specific phrases within quotation marks to filter out all other websites. As you can see, the only thing indexed in Google is the LBC atom feed.

Given the above information, it’s my recommendation that the LBC move their website to a different URL that isn’t blacklisted from Google. If their true goal is to promote these books, then they’ll want the valuable search engine traffic that comes from the three search engines that combine together to make up over 90% of all internet searches. If I were the LBC, I would take this very seriously. Search engine traffic is very valuable.

UPDATE: It appears that the Litblog Co-Op is looking into the issue and they’re possibly going to move to Wordpress.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As I initially suspected, there was a no-follow link in their source code which was deflecting Google bots. I emailed one of the Co-op bloggers and they’ve located the no-follow link and got rid of it.

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In a new Wired article titled How Yahoo Blew It, Fred Vogelstein highlights the many mistakes Yahoo committed that led to them losing text-advertising dominance. He quickly glosses over what, in my opinion, was their largest mistake by not buying up Google’s search techonlogy when it was first offered to them on the cheap. To Vogelstein, their main problem was that they didn’t refine their text-based advertising quickly enough, buying Overture and then not updating its technology and implementing it into Yahoo right away. At one point of the article, he claims that Yahoo CEO Terry Semel was infuriated because Google’s success “could have been [Yahoo's success]“:

Semel could talk tough because he had a backup plan. Yahoo would go out and buy its own top-notch search engine and its own search-advertising technology, and it would beat Google in the emerging arena of little text ads that pop up next to search results. Semel’s decision to opt for this plan B was a fateful one. It was a smart play — but Yahoo fumbled, bungled, and mishandled its execution at every step. (More on that in a moment.) As a result, Google today controls nearly 70 percent of the search-related advertising market, an industry worth more than $15 billion a year and growing at roughly 50 percent a year. It’s these ads that are the source of Google’s riches and the basis for its expanding power.

And what must infuriate Semel: This could have been Yahoo.

What Vogelstein fails to note properly is that Yahoo’s loss on the text-advertising market is only a small part of the problem. The main obstacle lies with the fact that Google has such a large dominance in search. Sure, if Yahoo had better advertising technology quicker, then they could have gotten a slightly larger chunk than they did, but that still doesn’t mean they would have grabbed the largest market share in online text advertising. They can only get so many people to click on their ads when only a certain number of users are performing Yahoo searches instead of Google searches.

Checking my own stats, 92.58% of search engine hits to Bloggasm come from Google. From Yahoo? A measly 1.88%. It doesn’t even beat out MSN search. To suggest that Yahoo could even come close to out-performing Google in text-based advertising would be to ignore the total number of users who search from the two engines.

Yahoo just simply doesn’t have the numbers.

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