Traffic Flow SEO

Yahoo is shutting down their Publisher Network. What is confusing is why they chose not to send this traffic to their new partner Microsoft instead of sending them to Chitika.

Below is Yahoo's official letter, yet the Yahoo YPN blog has remained quiet about this change so far (last post 2/12/10).

Dear Publisher,

Yahoo! continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services, in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences. After conducting an extensive review of the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program, we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. We expect to deliver final publisher payments for the month ending April 30, 2010 to publishers no later than May 31, 2010. All publishers eligible for 1099s for the 2010 tax year will have those mailed by January 31, 2011.

Because our content will no longer be delivered to your ad unit spaces after April 30, 2010, we recommend removing all YPN ad code from your pages by that date.

For the opportunity to continue earning revenue, we suggest using Chitika, a leading advertising network that syndicates Yahoo! Content Match and Sponsored Search ads. Chitika has set up a special process for YPNO beta publishers to participate in its platform. Click here for more information.

We thank you for your participation in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta. If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please contact our Support Team at (866) 785-2636, Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PDT.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo!

Resources:

Chitika - FAQ Transition Page
TechCrunch - Yahoo Publisher Network To Be Axed, Customers Referred To Chitika Instead
Yahoo - Publisher Network

Remember cuil? I don't blame you if you don't as there was a ton of hype around this being the next big 'Google Killer' a year or two ago and not much after. cuil never lived up to the hype, but yet continues to somehow survive and manages to keep providing the same non-relevant results as always.

Well, recently I found (via TechCrunch) this great information showing a little known, but pretty cool search engine called Duck Duck Go that is leveraging some brand equity (if there is any left) from cuil (at least someone is getting something from it) by creating two new websites that look and feel as cuil, but actual provide relevant results (via Duck Duck Go).

These sites are called:

cuiler - link
cuilest - link

In addition, you may find this entertaining. Here is a link to explain and define a 'cuil' - cuil defined





Also, some late breaking news from Ask.com. Someone within the organization has finally decided to update their blog with a new post.

This post is almost as compelling as their last. It is titled: Ada Lovelace Day: Who Do We Think Are Great Women in Technology? and it only took them 132 days to update it. Kudos to whoever is in charge of that....:-)

I am not sure I have ever seen a single image that best sums up my feelings about the Google vs. Facebook contest until today when I stumbled on this image that basically says it all without having to say anything at all. Now that Facebook has become the most trafficked site in the US (beating Google) and a recent study showed that the engagement level with Facebook is better than Google, now all Facebook needs is a business model to actually make some money and we may have actually finally found the Google killer (for now)...:-)

I just read a great roundup of data points from an EntireWeb newsletter that I just have to re-post as it is too good to let go by without sharing.

EnitreWeb original article - 2009 by the Numbers
EntireWeb newsletter subscriptions - Entireweb Webmaster Newsletter

Now the data:

Email

* 90 trillion - The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
* 247 billion - Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.4 billion - The number of email users worldwide.
* 100 million - New email users since the year before.
* 81% - The percentage of emails that were spam.
* 92% - Peak spam levels late in the year.
* 24% - Increase in spam since last year.
* 200 billion - The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

* 234 million - The number of websites as of December 2009.
* 47 million - Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

* 13.9% - The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
* -22.1% - The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
* 35.0% - The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
* 384.4% - The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
* -72.4% - The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

* 81.8 million - .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
* 12.3 million - .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
* 7.8 million - .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
* 76.3 million - The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
* 187 million - The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
* 8% - The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

* 1.73 billion - Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
* 18% - Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
* 738,257,230 - Internet users in Asia.
* 418,029,796 - Internet users in Europe.
* 252,908,000 - Internet users in North America.
* 179,031,479 - Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
* 67,371,700 - Internet users in Africa.
* 57,425,046 - Internet users in the Middle East.
* 20,970,490 - Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

* 126 million - The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
* 84% - Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
* 27.3 million - Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
* 57% - Percentage of Twitter's user base located in the United States.
* 4.25 million - People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter's most followed user).
* 350 million - People on Facebook.
* 50% - Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
* 500,000 - The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

* 4 billion - Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
* 2.5 billion - Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
* 30 billion - At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

* 1 billion - The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
* 12.2 billion - Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
* 924 million - Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
* 182 - The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
* 82% - Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
* 39.4% - YouTube online video market share (USA).
* 81.9% - Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

* 62.7% - Internet Explorer
* 24.6% - Firefox
* 4.6% - Chrome
* 4.5% - Safari
* 2.4% - Opera
* 1.2% - Other

Malicious software

* 148,000 - New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
* 2.6 million - Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
* 921,143 - The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom, Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

You knew it was going to happen......Today (actually this afternoon), according to HitWise, Facebook has just surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US using data from March 7 - March 13.

An interesting aside is that Google's traffic increased by only 9% while Facebook's increased 185% as compared to the same week in 2009 and both properties together accounted for roughly 14% of all US Internet visits during the March 7 - March 13 timeframe.

Link to HitWise Post - Facebook Reaches Top Ranking in US

Many people believe that Google has grown a little too much and is slowly becoming a monopoly within many aspects of our lives. While it does not seem harmful now as much of there services are free (superficially at least) currently, that may and probably will change at some point. Everyone and everything is always friendly while everything is moving along smoothly, what really will show Google's true colors is when they start to hit some rough patches, which up until this point they have not (or at least not big enough to create any large problems for them).

Below is a video to get you up-to-date as to what is going on within our Google World. What is interesting is that this post is currently being hosting on the Google web property - YouTube (for now).



I would love to get your feedback and/or thoughts, so please feel free to make comments and continue the conversation as this point is very slanted towards the 'conspiracy theory' side and I would love to hear all sides.

Looking forward to your feedback!

Just a little SEO fun(ny) to lighten up your day......Enjoy.....:-)

TotalAbout is a great new FREE website reference that allows you to input a URL and find out a lot about it on one place. In my tests I found it to be pretty accurate and useful when evaluating the value of any website. The data covers a large amount of ground inclusive of:

- Domain information
- Web Details
- DMOZ category listings
- Related websites
- Server speed
- Visitors by country
- Traffic rank by country
- Sub-domain information
- Keyword traffic
- Keyword density
.....and much more

Check it out today at - TotalAbout

I would like to put forth a new valuation method to better understand how much a company may value it's search engine. I feel that we can use a search engine's blog as an indicator as to how a company may value it's search engine. I had my own preconceived notions as to what the outcome would be and they were dead on, so maybe monitoring blog activity can tell you a lot. Check out the data below:

Major Search Engines:

Google Blog:
- Last post 3/8/10
- 61 posts for 2010 to date

Bing Search Blog
- Last post 3/5/10
- 35 posts for 2010 to date

Yahoo Search Blog
- Last post 3/5/10
- 18 posts for 2010 to date

Ask.com Blog
- Last post 11/9/09
- 0 posts for 2010 to date

Kind of revealing huh?