Recently I blogged that Google is an SEO agency because its purchase of DoubleClick also included the latter’s SEO service, Performics.

Tom Phillips, Director, DoubleClick Integration has announced in the official Google blog that Performics Search Marketing will be sold. He said,

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.

What? The company that hijacked the term “search engine marketing” (SEM) and coyly restricted its meaning to what the rest of us know as “pay-per-click” (PPC) advertising is getting out of SEM?

Actually, no. There is no need to dump your GOOG stock. I think Tom meant “search marketing” the first time, as he said in the next breath. He was, of course, referring to Performics - its SEO arm. I don’t think anyone is surprised that Google couldn’t be in the PPC business and the SEO business. At least the Performics staff have a sporting chance of having a job when someone buys this arm, unlike the 300 DoubleClickers who are being laid off. Perhaps they can still have Google on their resumes.

Added: Link to Matt Cutts’ post about this.

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I was sucked in. :oops: I have edited my post because a friend alerted me that this domain is registered to someone in Malaysia. I can now expect a lot of spam from there. Fortunately it didn’t try to get me to log in with a Google Account. Beware.

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Google has been testing a simplified new interface in Australia for Advanced Search. I haven’t seen any mentions of it from people in North America or elsewhere.

The top of the form seems friendlier:

Find web pages that have…

all these words:
this exact wording or phrase:
one or more of these words:

But don’t show pages that have…

any of these unwanted words:

Need more tools?

Results per page:
Language:
File type:
Search within a site or domain:

Then a collapsible area for “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more”.

It is currently visible at 72.14.253.104, 72.14.253.99, 72.14.253.103, and 72.14.253.147. This has only been seen for google.com, not google.com.au. I think Google has made the right call for me at least, as I rarely use the options that have been collapsed.

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NetRegistry’s latest newsletter had an intriguing headline, “NetRegistry Ditches Microsoft Search“, which sounds as important as the EU fining the software giant. It is quite a non-event, but worthy of some discussion.

NetRegistry offers a URL submission service called GoLive, which included submission to Google, Yahoo and MSN (Live). It will no longer submit to Live Search because it found that submissions take about 42 days to take effect, whereas Google takes 14 days and Yahoo takes 22 days.

Submitting a URL only to search engines is harmless but not necessary, as long as you can get a link from some other web site that is already known to the search engines, because the target website will be discovered through that link. Perhaps if you have no link friends, a submission service might help. When I was at Melbourne IT, I introduced products that included both directory and search engine submissions because some small business sites have no link providers and they could be waiting for a long time to get that first link.

Getting back to Microsoft Live Search, a lot of SEOs have been saying for a while that MSN Search (now Live Search) is both a poor search experience and it is harder to get listed there, or to be crawled fully. I have no clue what’s happening in Redmond, but 2-3 years ago they had a focus group called Search Champs. I wasn’t invited, but some well-known and capable search marketers were, and they had a great time listening to and sharing their views during their many on-site meetups. Who knows if any of their input was used, because I haven’t met anyone who thinks highly of Live Search as it stands today.

I am monitoring many tens of third-party sites for a research project (not much SEO work done) and I can confirm that Google picks up new sites within hours, not days, while Yahoo takes about two weeks. Ranking success for some of the noncompetitive Google sites came within a week and in most cases within a month, although very competitive sites will need off-page link love that could take longer. Yahoo ranking success came within two weeks for the noncompetitive sites. Barely one or two sites have ranked below 100 in Live Search after six weeks. Competitive sites take much longer, as they do in the other two search engines.

Will Live Search ever be a major player, disregarding the users whose home page is still set to MSN/ninemsn? I would like to think so, as competition is great for users.

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Yahoo! Site Explorer has added a feature that enables you to specify your URLs in a more search-engine friendly manner.  If the site has been submitted to Yahoo and authenticated, you will notice a new button called Dynamic URLs.

If my URLs looked like this:  http://example.com/store?prod=1&sid=23yadh56, I could use this tool to strip out the “sid” (session ID), which is a good thing. I could also rewrite some URLs such as http://example.com/blog?src=rssfeed to read http://example.com/blog?src=yhoo_srch.

It is a good option, but would I use it?  If Yahoo! were the only search engine, then yes, but since there are three big SEs out there and any number of lesser engines, I’d rather use mod_rewrite at the Apache level to fix all my URLs. Read more about Dynamic URLs at the Yahoo! site.

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I stumbled upon this event (http://searchcamp.in) by accident and then found that two of my friends - Milind Mody of eBrandz and Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm are among the people organising an exciting event in Chennai (aka Madras) on October 6 and 7. I note other well-known names who will also help to make it a success.

Billed as an unconference, it is a low-priced (Rs 500) opportunity to connect with SEO and PPC exponents and experts. Check out the website. I cannot be there but wish them all the best.

Comment: They seem to use the term “SEM” to mean PPC and other paid click solutions such as CPA, but then that is what the main ad networks want people to believe. For those of us from traditional marketing backgrounds or expert watering holes such as Webmasterworld, SEM = SEO, PPC, blogs, press releases, articles etc - anything that helps your marketing through a search engine.

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