Section 2-Around the Net in Search: Searching 9 Semantic Engines

By Laurie Sullivan , April 13, 2009 Subscribe | Back Issues | Reply to Editor | MediaPost Home

Making Money From SEO Seth Godin's Blog Seth Godin explains two ways to use SEO to make money. The first, owning a keyword in Google paid search or organic search, is a "glorious crapshoot," with only .00001% of companies succeeding. He still thinks it's worth trying. The second technique involves "inventing a trademark and then building a business or service or organization around this trademark that people actually talk about," he writes. "You want to be able to say to someone, 'just type ____ into Google."' - Read the whole story... FDA Up In Arms About Redirects Pharma Marketing Blog The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently sent 14 pharmaceutical companies notices that their search campaign violated FDA regulations, according to John Mack. One example points to "vanity" and "redirect" URLs in Google AdWords, which Mack writes Google doesn't allow. It appears, according to Mack, that Google has made an exception to its policy by allowing pharmaceutical marketers to create AdWords that mention drug's benefits without including the drug name. "Consumer might be 'fooled' into thinking they were going to an independent site and not to a pharmaceutical company site," Mack writes. "Would they be harmed? Probably not." - Read the whole story... Testing AdWords Display URLs Brent's Online Journal "In eight years of operating an Internet business, I've learned that small changes can yield big results," notes Brent Crouch. He notes how he tested various changes in one of his Google AdWords campaigns, including adding a related keyword to the Display URL -- "the url shown when an ad is displayed, but it has nothing to do with where the user is directed to when an ad is clicked" -- which in one case more than triple conversion rates, but in another worked against conversions. These variations in words and scenarios make it important to test, test, test. Crouch points to processes marketers can use to test performance of the ad groups, providing visuals to demonstrate his points. - Read the whole story... Banter On Twitter: Matt Cutts And Michael Gray Sphinn Harith highlights an interesting exchange of tweets on Twitter between Google's Matt Cutts and Michael Gray, also known as Graywolf, who wanted to know why a "'diggbar' page is indexed despite the new noindex tag http://tinyurl.com/dku9nq." Aside from noindex exclusions, the 140-character tweetathon on the microblogging site Twitter covered URLs and robots.txt disallows. The post also highlights a list of other tweet exchanges between Graywolf and Halfdeck, as well as between Graywolf and g1smd. - Read the whole story... Searching 9 Semantic Engines Search Engine Journal Arun Radhakrishnan provides a list of nine semantic search engines, along with descriptions and photos for each. Included are Hakia, Kosmix, Exalead, and SenseBot. The appeal of semantic search engines points to less spam and more relevant ads, Radhakrishnan writes. "It would be harder to game a semantic Web engine," he writes. Faster and more accurate query results in less keywords, between three and four max. - Read the whole story...

Search Insider - Around the Net for Monday, April 13, 2009 http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showEdition&art_send_date=2009-4-13&art_type=44

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