Is The Time Ripe For Search Marketing Standards?

Is The Time Ripe For Search Marketing Standards?

Over the past ten to twelve years, various SEM practitioners have brought up the need for industry standards. I started asking the question in 1998, and others have brought it up since, but the industry seems to have a laissez faire attitude.

Albeit, we've seen some standardization steps taken by the search engines themselves. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft got together on the Sitemaps protocol, and Google, Ask.com, and Microsoft are now anonymizing log file data. Subsequently, Google called for international privacy standards. The November 2007 FTC public forum on behavioral advertising also focused on privacy concerns. These are all steps toward industry standardization with regard to consumer privacy, an issue search engines must address to maintain public trust. But search engines are not as motivated to establish standards for search engine marketing tactics.

From Internet Marketing and Online Annonsering