What did I miss?

Oh dear, a whole month without posting. Don’t worry; I haven’t shut up shop, just been a bit busy on the work front. As always, a lot has gone on in the last month so it seems best to start with a recap of the month gone by to get us back up to speed:

MIVA closes down operations – as suggested may happen by The Digital Lookout back in Sep 2008 MIVA has finally closed down operations. Once a reasonable addition to any search marketing campaign MIVA has failed to keep up with the pace of change in search engine marketing and has been on a downward spiral for the last 3 or 4 years and has finally packed up its SERPs and gone home.

Ask Brings back Jeeves – in a bid to regain some of its character Ask has brought back Jeeves as the face of its search activity. The former front man for the Ask search engine has had a facelift and returned as Ask continues its bid for a foothold in the search marketplace.

Adwords Launches New Interface – Adwords has launched into testing a new interface, and the initial reactions haven’t been good! It appears the “revert to old interface” button has become the most used button in Google’s system! Of course there will come a point when it is forced upon us and we will be force to use it. No doubt in a couple of months we will be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Microsoft and Yahoo Continue to Court – without any seeming progress being made Microsoft and Yahoo have continued to court each other over potential mergers and partnerships in the battle to compete with Google. No solid progress appears to have been made but the feeling within the industry is that Microsoft will be powering Yahoo search by this time next year.

Everyone Still Loves Twitter – Twitter is still the darling of the social media world and its user numbers continue to grow every month. Question marks still remain as to what its long term revenue model will be with some suggesting it will be apps, not ads, which will be the focus of their efforts to make money.

Google Adds Further Functionality to Their SERPs – Google released details of a number of new features to enhance the SERPs including:
• Rich Snippets and microformats
• Date based searches
• Chameleon
• Spellmeleon
• Wonder Wheel

Read about what this means at the Latitude Group Search Marketing News Section

Google Changes its US Trademark Policy – a year on from opening up trademarked keywords to Adwords bidders Google has further expanded this policy and from June is going to be allowing non brand owners to use the company name in their ad text, increasing the cost of brand clicks and making the brand SERPs a very confusing place!

×

Hello!

Click below to chat on WhatsApp or send me an email to [email protected]

× Chat