This image from RustyBrick:

Here’s where the sitelinks are added in the campaign settings:

Even my wife, who shunned the digital world including email until a couple of years ago, now spends many hours on-line. As for me, the only time I go to the phonebook is for an older company that I think might not have a web site, and even then, I will go to an online phonebook first.

This article lists the results of a recent study and highlights where people are going for local business information, The article also chronicles the shifts that have occurred over the last three years. http://searchenginewatch.com/3635350

If the phonebook isn’t dead, it is fading fast.

1. Reading onscreen is hard, for everyone.
   • Use short paragraphs.
   • Use short lines.
   • Use wide line spacing and nice margins.
   • Use dark text on a light background. 
   • Scrolling up-and-down is OK
   • Use lists.
2. They browse in an F-shape
3. They can’t remember your web address (being at the top of search results for your name means nothing)
4. They don’t search for your name (they search for answers to problems)
5. They don’t want to log in (or anything standing between them and their goal)
6. They don’t want an ‘experience’ (simple is better)
7. They do want your newsletter (make it prevalent and easy to sign-up)
8. They don’t care how clever you are. (just the facts please)
9. They aren’t enticed by mystery.
10. They get lost a lot (make navigation easy, redundant, and extend to your 404 pages)
11. They aren’t using cell phones  (at least not in big numbers)
12. They still use Internet Explorer (so be sure it works in IE)
13. They’re using big monitors. (so don’t create 800 X 600 layouts)
14. They need to want (create desire)

In this video, Google’s Greg Grothaus does a great job explaining duplicate content problems and solutions ranging from 301 redirects to canonical tags.

I have previously blogged about how 301 redirects can prevent common problems from diluting the search engine ranking for your site. However, there are however a number of situations that create duplicate content concerns that are more difficult address. Webmasters now have additional tools to deal with duplicate content through Google’s Webmaster Tools panel. Through this addition to webmaster tools, Google Lets You Tell Them Which URL Parameters To Ignore. This will a great help, especially for many large dynamic sites.

In the deal the search brand at Yahoo will remain to be “Yahoo Search” but it will be  “Powered by Bing.”  There will be no immediate changes however until they get regulatory approval, following approval the integration effort will move forward (expected early 2010).

What about allocating advertising dollars?
In the deal it appears that some mix of Yahoo Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter advertising will continue.  It was reported that Yahoo ads will continue to run in the Yahoo properties with Microsoft getting 12% of the revenue and some Yahoo ads will be syndicated over the Microsoft network. Bing will run ads on Microsoft properties (and may run some ads on the Yahoo network as well), but the details are unclear at this point. It will take some time for all this to shake out, with conversions rates ultimately determining where ad dollars will need to be spent.

What about optimizing for Bing?
This is really a non-starter, Google’s market share is so large that doing anything that could compromise your traffic from that engine would be a mistake. Unless Bing’s market share increases more than just picking up Yahoo traffic, there is really no point – as long as the feature sets remain similar. If  features emerge that are unique to Bing, and could be supported without impacting your Google traffic, then optimizating for those features would be in order.

Press Release: http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/pressroom/Default.aspx

If you were bidding on a broad term like “Marketing” the report shows all the phrases that were triggered from that term, you might see “internet marketing“, “web marketing” or “marketing on the internet.”  You can then evaluate the click thru rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and conversions on that term to determine if it’s a good fit for your business. The report also helps you identify phrases that might not be good for your business, but are generating clicks and costing you money. Using the information in the report, you can add the phrases that work into your campaign and add negatives to filter out the phrases that don’t.

The only issue with the Search Query Performance report has been that Google has always lumped lower volume quires into groups called “other unique queries.” This has been a point of contention because it obscures some number of phrases that were successful and hides terms that could be used as ‘negatives’ to remove irrelevant searches for your campaign.

Google announced that starting Tuesday, May 19, 2009 the Search Query Performance report will show all queries that resulted in a click… (Yeah!)
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/05/enhanced-search-query-performance.html

It can be challenging to discover if:

• You’ve got a true penalty
• You’ve been outranked according to the current algorithm
• It’s a Google bug (from algorithm tweaks)

Simple Checks Include:

1. Is your robots.text page restricting access?
2. Has an errant noindex or no-follow tag found its way to a section of your site?
3. Have you checked Google’s webmaster tools for error messages?
4. Have you checked WebmasterWorld to see if recent changes to the algorithm are effecting others?

Props to “tedster” on the webmaterworld thead, this list is an excerpt from an older posting of his:

Additional checks:

1. Do your pages show with a site:example.com search?
   If they did once and they do not now, this is most likely a ban – the most extreme kind of penalty. It’s becoming quite rare to be completely banned rather than penalized – usually those who are banned know what they’ve been doing. Technical problems with your site, or some times Google may be at fault.
2. Does your site still rank #1 for a search on your domain name example.com?
   If so, but your other important search rankings ALL slipped badly, this is often a sign of a penalty. Study up on the posts in our Hot Topics area for ideas.
3. Does a search for relatively unique phrases taken from your title tags return your URL relatively high?
   If so, but your principle search rankings have dropped out the bottom, you may have lost the power of a good number of your backlinks. This is not necessarily a true penalty, but if you have been a part of some backlink scheme, even unwittingly, you may have been penalized for it.

Also, check any outbound links on your pages to be sure that the site they point to is still what you intended. Other domains can change ownership (or just change their conduct) and become part of a “bad neighborhood”. If others also have access to your site, be sure that no hidden content has been added without your knowledge, especially hidden links.

Other good posts on the subject:

• Do I Have a Google Penalty?
• Am I penalized? What type of penalty do I have?
• Diagnosing a possible penalty