Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

Why Bartz Won’t Sell Yahoo! (Just Yet)

Microsoft want Yahoo! Search… All of it.

It is no secret that Microsoft wants this business, and those who have been in the industry will recall previous attempts, most significantly the shennanigans of 2008, which saw an unsolicited proposal to buy the whole Yahoo! business in February of that year, for $44.6 BN dollars in cash and shares. Following the rejection and counter-position of the offer from Yahoo! to $53 BN, (equivanlent to $33 a share and almost double the then shareprice) Steve Ballmer, in a letter to Jerry Yang, announced Microsoft were pulling out of the offer and would not be willing to meet the asking price.

Later that year an opportunist alliance between activist investor Carl Icann and Microsoft, saw yet another unsolicited bid; this time for the search business only, under the terms that Icahn would depose the board of directors for the remaining Yahoo! business and install a new board of directors under his leadership. Chairman Roy Bostock issued a statement resoundly rejecting the proposal (which was issued with a 24 hour response deadline) on grounds that a carve-up of the business would be damaging and undervalued the company’s assests. Again the “buy the whole company for $33 dollars a share or get lost” message was loud and clear. (more…)

Microformats and RDF, is this the right time?

A low-level buzz in SEO that’s steadily becoming louder is the use of microformats. A brief primer: microformats, also known as ‘structured data’, is extra markup that surrounds your content, containing metadata that give search engine crawlers extra information about the content.

There are many different types of microformats, each with their own unique schema and rules, and each useful for a different type of data. A few examples:

  • hCard – the microformat version of vCard, useful for content describing people, places, and organisations.
  • hReview – the microformat for reviews of products, services, events, etc.
  • hCalendar – the microformat version of iCalendar.
  • XFN – a microformat for quantifying human relationships in links. (more…)

SEO: Where to Next?

So where is SEO going? Like lifes many mysteries, similar to “Why are we here?” and “If a tree fell in a forest would it make a sound?”. There is no clear defined answer which is why SES kindly put together a panel of experts within the online environment to discuss…

It is always nice to be in an open session, I feel it allows the speakers more freedom to say what they want on a variety of aspects of search. More importantly it lets us hear them talk with their guard down; this hope of a slip up was mainly aimed at the Google employee, Maile Ohye.

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Is Search evolving into Online Anthropology?

This post was originally posted by Lisa Myers on Searchcowboys

I’m fascinated by search marketing, both paid and organic and I think most search marketers can agree that search is much more than just the relationship between a website and the search engines. It’s about the relationship between:

  • The user and the search engine
  • The user and the keyword/s they use in the search engines
  • The search engines and your website
  • The user and your website

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