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Friday, August 29, 2008

Will MS IE8 help Microsoft in the search battle?

Microsoft is throwing whatever it can lay its hands on, at Google. The latest evidence is the upcoming Internet Explorer 8"being built with a few tricks to try and knee-cap Google.
"We didnt design this with Google in mind," insists Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch.
The new browser comes with a search box in the upper right-hand corner and, just below that, a row of tiny logos for various search destinations, such as Yahoo, Ebay and MySpace. You can select which destinations you want to include hereAnother Google-dodging feature in the new browser: Highlighting a street address on a Web page launches a map, with the default set to Microsofts Live Maps (though you can change this default to Google Maps).
Will it be enough? Not on its own"especially as Mozillas Firefox continues to eat away at IEs market share. But, if Microsoft can throw enough pots and pans new products at Google, maybe it can at least prevent Google from reaching 100% search share.
What do you think? Will IE8 help Microsoft in its battle with Google?

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Improved Flash indexing

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Improved Flash indexing

No More Need to Trash the Flash

Google has delighted web designers the world over with the announcement that they are now indexing Adobe Flash files better than ever before.

Google can now index any kind of textual content embedded in Flash files. They can also discover URLs. From the official Google blog post:

“Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.”

Google AdSense to Be Migrated into Google Analytics

A rumor circulating that Google Analytics will soon be adding Google AdSense data to the web analytics package. Amit managed to secure some screen shots of the AdSense related reports. The AdSense specific content seems to be found under the "Content" tab and includes:

(1) AdSense ad clicks per page
(2) AdSense Revenue generated per page
(3) CTR and CPM on a per page basis
(4) Also, a "Top AdSense Referrers" report that shows you which referring sites will generate the most ad clicks for you.

Many forum members are excited at this possibility. One says that it "might "eliminate the hassle of comparing adsense impressions to google analytics page views," which is certainly true. It's better to combine the greatest features than to have them scattered throughout for sure.

The only concern is for those who share their analytics data with clients or colleagues; in this case, those sharing analytics data may not want others to see financial information. However, you can likely use a filter -- or Google may come up with a good solution to hide this information from those sharing the analytics account

Monday, August 25, 2008

Inside AdWords: New features in Website Optimizer

Inside AdWords: New features in Website Optimizer

Some days ago, the Google Adwords and Google Website Optimizer blogs reported some new updates to Google Website Optimizer.

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Experiment Pruning: This allows you to disable one or more combinations from taking part in your Website Optimizer experiments. Pruning can help you achieve faster, more meaningful results by allowing you to remove poorly performing or illogical combinations. This is especially helpful in cases where your experiment may have too many combinations relative to the amount of traffic it receives.

In the past, there wasn't an easy way for you to disable low performing or
illogical combinations. You'd have to stop a test, make a copy, lose all your test data, and then launch a new test. That's all changing starting today. Now, you can simply select any number of page variations from your experiment report, click our new "Disable" button, and you're done. Easy as that. All your future traffic will be sent to your remaining page variations, and you'll be on the path to quicker, more actionable test results

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A/B Offline Validation:
You'll now be able to just upload a copy of your tagged page and Website Optimizer will make sure that everything is tagged properly.
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More Intuitive Reporting: We've enhanced our reports to more clearly show how your combinations are performing, and to better indicate when we've found one or more high-confidence winning combinations. This will help prevent you from drawing false conclusions from results or from ending experiments prematurely.

Create Content To #drawthecrowds

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