The new Place Search by Google is causing a stir in SEO circles. I am still seeing many layouts, not just the fat one which resembles 7 organic results tagged with a balloon and their Place Pages link, with a map to the right.
But I didn’t expect to see a SERP with just 5 organic results. Behold:
I had an unused domain at Yahoo! Domains (the mechanics of which are operated by Melbourne IT). I had bought it when the price was ridiculously cheap – $0.99 or $1.99. I think I tried to move it to GoDaddy some years ago, which has most of my domains, but gave up. I tried it again last week, but I was determined to finish the job this time.
So I hope that anyone else who has difficulty in transferring a domain to GoDaddy will have less trouble. You start the process by logging in and hovering on the Domains drop-down, which will reveal Transfer Domain.
An email is sent to the holder of the domain at the email address on record in the whois system. That’s you.
The official Google blog has just announced the rolling out of the new-look local search results, known as Place Search. Here is an example:
URL for above search: http://www.google.com.au/search?num=20&hl=en&newwindow=1&esrch=LocalMergeImpl%3A%3AExperiment&q=los+angeles+pizza&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
The Google blog says:
Today we’re introducing Place Search, a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places. We’ve clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go. Continue reading
A new Seattle company doxo has launched, offering to help companies that presently send paper bills to their customers.
doxo has set up a WordPress-based website and blog but it hasn’t spent much time thinking of SEO or online reputation hygiene factors. Quite understandable for a startup with better things to think about, but they need to fix the latter ASAP, if not sooner (doxo peeps, contact me — it’s not something to put in a blog post). Continue reading
I haven’t seen much discussion of this test, which was reported by TheSearchAgents back in June.
Google has been placing ads that are “related” to the query, I suspect, when there isn’t enough ad inventory for the search term. I was looking for “private bank” and got ads related to “wealth management”, “term deposit” and “investment account”.
It doesn’t always happen. I searched for “trucks” and got just four ads. “Bulldogs” got me none. The example used by Alec Green “facial at home” did bring up a “related to” ad for “facial mask”.
I think it is a win-win situation for advertisers where there isn’t enough ad inventory. I’m curious to see if this pops up where there is enough inventory but many ads with a low quality score.
I installed the Web of Trust add-on for Firefox some weeks ago but I haven’t made up my mind about its usefulness.
Its purpose is to allow users to rate a website in four areas: