I'm sure everyone is aware of the tension between the West & Iran. Me being a news nut, I went to Google and typed in Iran. Here is what pops up in natural search. What you'll notice is there is an obvious immersion of Universal Search Results on page one, but to stay on point with the post, you'll see a map of Iran at the very top of the SERP. This is the first time I've personally seen foreign maps propagating natural search results like this and I find myself curious if this has been around for some time?

Anyway, after further digging with searches for other countries such as Russia, Iraq, UAE, India, Austria, etc., I noticed something VERY interesting in a search for China in that it's the only country out of about 30 or so searches that didn't have a map in search results and required an additional click on the Maps link to actually get maps of the country. To me it doesn't make any sense why Google would change its map inclusion protocol in search results for just one country out of over the 30 country searches I conducted.

I'm sure there are other orphaned country map examples out there, but why doesn't Google just have a standard for country-specific searches pulling into search results in a similar fashion?

- Twitter
- Pownce
- Jaiku
- tumblr
- Jabber
- Frazr
- Wamadu
- Mambler
- Boomloop
- Wevent
- gmail
- Roundhousekick

Brabblr calls itself a mashUp for the micro-services and looks like a promising solution for people who are on the go and have little time to keep their friends up to date with the changes taking place in their lives. Here's another interesting way to make sense of our busy lives!

We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between. ... 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.

This brings up several satellite issues:

• Since it's been so difficult to index Flash content, a virtual cottage industry sprang up with ways to circumvent that disability, including methods like SWFObject, sIFR, user-agent-based delivery of plain text vs. Flash content, and so on. With these techniques becoming more sophisticated and easy to implement, is it likely that sites will abandon them soon?
  
• It appears that for now, Flash files spawned when users fail a JavaScript test will still be uncrawlable, since engines too typically fail a JS sniffer.
  
• If you have a SWF file embedded as only a part of a larger HTML page, trust me that you do NOT want only that SWF file being returned in search results. It typically looks awful, lacking both the size requirements you implemented, as well as the critical navigation that resides in your HTML. The Webmaster Central post didn't say that SWF files would be returned in SERPs, so I'm not saying that's what will happen. But I've tested client sites by searching for strings of text that only appear in Flash files, and I've seen it happen. So test with your own site and cross your fingers.

I chose a somewhat sarcastic post title because ever since search engines and Flash have butted heads, the ability for engines to index text embedded in Flash files has been "just around the corner." In 2002, for example, hearts were briefly aflutter about the Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK, which was going to be the end of engines' inability to index Flash content. Hear that? The end. 2002.

So I enter into this new era with guarded optimism. Optimistic because Google never releases anything "new" until it's been tested in the wild for months or years. Guarded because the "right" recommendation for clients is never quite as black and white as people think it will be.

If you use a Javascript redirect vs. a 301or 302, don't forget that search engines generally cannot access Javascript, so it's likely that the search engine spider will not follow or index links within the Javascript.

It's also very risky business according to Google. From Google Webmaster Help Center:

"When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot..."

Matt Cutts from Google calls Javascript redirects "sneaky" and follows with "Your domains might get rained on in the near future." Yipes!

All very good reasons to avoid Javascript redirects.

Is it time to do a quick audit of your site to see if Javascript redirects are in play?

One question that hasn't been discussed to death, however, is the actual accuracy of the traffic numbers that Google is reporting. I ran some numbers on some sample sites and laid the Google Trends lines over the actual traffic numbers:

Example 1:

Example 2:

The verdict? In general, Google doesn't do too awfully bad, especially considering that neither of the sites above use Google Analytics or Urchin to measure their traffic.

The peaks and valleys are roughly similar. Roughly. Yet the scale is off pretty dramatically, with Google underreporting the traffic on one of the sites by a factor of two.

So my recommendation is that to gauge large trends (seasonality, results of large offline campaigns, etc.), Google Trends is a decent first look. It's probably a safe bet that when you plot two sites within the same vertical, that their relative lines will be more or less accurate when contrasted. But don't trust it for raw numbers.

Just to be fair, Google never said it was 100% accurate, stating in the post that "because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information."

While both defense strategies have their philosophical and practical pros and cons, DMOZ often seems paralyzed by its due process. Perhaps that's why, every once in a while in a matter of concession, you find most of a DMOZ category consisting of Wiki links, or more precisely, 30 out of 53 total links pointing to Wiki pages.

A daily budget is the amount you're willing to spend per day. When the limit is reached, your ads will typically stop showing for that day.

Monthly Budget – Beta

Monthly budget can be a good option for companies that see a large fluctuation in search volume and do not want to miss opportunities by being capped by a daily campaign budget limit. On the other side of the fence if you do not have the proper monthly PPC budget allocated for the month you can burn through your budget prematurely and end up going down mid month or be forced to add more monthly budget.

More Monthly Budget Info -

A monthly budget is the amount you're willing to spend per month. The main difference from the daily budget setting is that you can review your performance and campaign spending based on a monthly goal rather than a daily goal.
Monthly budgets are an expansion upon what already happens for your campaign spending with the daily budget option.

The same options are available for monthly budgets. This means that with standard delivery your ads will be shown evenly throughout each day during the month, and with accelerated delivery your ads will be shown as often as possible immediately, meaning that you could completely spend your entire monthly budget in a very short time (minutes, days, or hours, depending on your campaign settings).

Yet here we have it, and have you ever read anything that made Yahoo suddenly seem more insignificant?:

If the Google partnership passes what's likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. antitrust regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo! intends to use its rival's superior search technology to display ads on its own Web site as well as those of its partners' in the United States and Canada.

Let us all give a collective search way of goodbye to the once great king.

But what is this I see on the home page of MSNBC.com? It's an article that not only reiterates MSN losing the deal with Yahoo!, but now Yahoo! is in talks with Google on an advertising partnership agreement!!

Keep an eye on this y'all as I'm sure something will transpire sooner than later.

Over the past few months there have been many video submission sites popping up like weeds across the Web. One of the major challenges as a social media marketer is to keep track of where viral videos are appearing online. No longer does this have to be a major pain in the neck. A site called VideoFetcher is making it easy to search for videos across 100 video submission sites. Go here to download their tool bar to search for videos from your browser at anytime. Hopefully this new search tool will help some of you video junkies out there. Happy hunting!

Directives for the robots.txt file:

• Disallow
  
• Allow
  
• $ Wildcard
  
• * Wildcard
  
• Sitemaps location

Meta tags for insertion into HTML:

• NOINDEX
  
• NOFOLLOW
  
• NOSNIPPET
  
• NOARCHIVE
  
• NOODP

Of special note are the two different wildcard uses; the post links to usage models for each. One additional funny bit is in the explanation of NOARCHIVE, in which the post describes the tag's usage as "Do not make available to users a copy of the page from the Search Engine cache." Contrast this with "Do not cache the page," which I believe is most people's idea of the tag's effect. I love little semantic hooks like that.

The post notes that the directives above are observed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live, which is a nice bonus. In addition, the post discusses some directives that only Google honors, such as UNAVAILABLE_AFTER (which I discussed about a year ago), NOIMAGEINDEX, and NOTRANSLATE.

I appreciate what engines are doing with the REP advancements. It's the equivalent of the basic Robotstxt.org protocol being the vehicle, but the engines have become after-market accessory specialists, showing you how to get additional mileage, power, and stunts out of your car.

In a nutshell, the discussion was about potentially rewriting dynamic URLs.

He said:

"One thing we can't forget is that URLs are marketing assets....they matter....they need to be friendly to both users and search engines."

For a moment, I felt like I was at Progressive Field, about to rise out of my chair and high five complete strangers around me after a Grady Sizemore home run.

I couldn't have said that better myself. Bravo!!!

Here's the rough chronology. I may have missed some letters in the middle, but points A and Z are pretty accurate.

1. Melissa Chang runs a blog on her own domain, using the Tumblr platform. (For the uninitiated, Tumblr is roughly similar to Blogger or Wordpress, although many people seem to use "Tumblogs" as a middle ground between article-length posts and Twitter-like microblog posts.) She is unhappy with her search traffic and writes a post saying so.
2. Steve Rubel reads the post and bookmarks it at Del.icio.us.
3. Steve's bookmark shows up at FriendFeed, where he aggregates his various social media endeavors.
4. A conversation begins at FriendFeed about whether, and to what extent, the Tumblr platform is or is not search-friendly. A somewhat lively and mostly constructive discussion takes place.
5. Others lend various perspectives at their own blogs.
6. Tumblr reps follow -- and join -- the FriendFeed conversation(s).
7. Tumblr responds on its official blog, saying it has already made many of the changes that came from the discussion on FriendFeed and elsewhere.
8. Many are happy with the changes; some are not. My personal opinion is that Tumblr may have entered the egg-breaking stage of omelet-making. The site will be better off in the long run.

So a logical question is, how is a "conversation" like the one at FriendFeed different from Tumblr users merely writing to the Tumblr staff and making the same recommendations -- which some users claim they've been doing for a while? I don't know the answer to that. But I think the interest in and productivity resulting from the FriendFeed conversation had a lot to do with it.

Back in the day, big brands used to respond to customer letters. I mean respond. Like type up a reply and send it. This is because they realized that for each person who took the time to write or type a letter, stamp it, and walk it down to the mailbox (later known as the "barrier to entry"), there must be about 10,000 people who feel exactly the same way.

Today, you can send an email as easily as you can cook a Hot Pocket. Anyone can do it. So the 10,000:1 ratio or yore is more like 1:1 today. The FriendFeed conversation shows that not only is more than one person affected, but that actual recommendations can be spat out the back end. I think that's why the response was more rapid.

Very soon, this will be the norm in customer relations, at least for progressive, consumer-focused companies.

14% of Google clicks come from paid search and 86% of clicks are organic.

True in court it may only qualify as hearsay, having come from the Google mouth of Avinash Kaushik to the ear of beu blog before finally being transcribed into print; yet, as you may remember from my earlier quest for a documented source behind that most mythical of numbers in all of SEM, the percentage of overall searchers clicking on an organic, rather than paid, search result, hearsay here surely now trumps unattributed there.

And the alleged statement is said to have come from Google's Analytics Evangelist, folks, so I think we are getting closer...

Mr. Sharkey's article quotes Kip Hawley, the TSA's director, on the value of the TSA blog: "We knew we were going to get a big surge of negativity; we knew it would be a very juicy opportunity" for the angry, Mr. Hawley said, adding: "I think once people realize we’re putting substantive content on there and really answering questions, the tone will calm down — and it will lead to the same thing happening at the checkpoint."

While some companies think that they can't risk negative publicity by inviting public comment on a corporate blog, they maybe should think again. If the TSA, surely a magnet for anger and potentially inflammatory public comment can see the value of reaching out to the public, what might a brand gain from doing the same thing?