Perhaps they needed to free up some funds?

The 3 companies have allowed ad company, Phorm, to access customers browsing records in order to serve relevant ads to any website publisher wishing to join the scheme.  The proceeds would then be shared between Phorm, the 3 Internet providers and the website publisher.

From the article:

A marketer that wants to reach wealthy golfers, for instance, would not have to restrict itself to advertising on golf sites. Because the ad system would track golfers’ Web habits, it could follow them to other sites and show them golf-related ads there, too.

Queue Homer-esque response, “ewwwwww”!

OK, I have mixed feelings about this.  As a website owner, SEO and marketing professional having revenue and advertising alternatives is pretty good, but I really don’t know how comfortable I am being tracked at that level.  Although the article does say that customers of the ISPs involved will be able to opt out of the scheme (and will only be tracked by unique ID and not personal information), it still doesn’t sit very well with me.

Esther Dyson (tech analyst and investor) noted;

Bombarding consumers with more and more ads, even “relevant” ones, risks sending them to social networking services and other places on the Internet where advertisers find it harder to reach them.

That’s a fair point to a certain degree, although I think if Esther had more knowledge of the SEM industry she might consider whether or not social network traffic is that hard to reach for advertisers.

Small guy might be missing out here

Just going through the signup process at Phorm, I see they start their publisher info request form with traffic details – smallest on the list is 500k – 1 million – so it would seem they are targeting higher traffic sites or possibly networks.  I sent in an enquiry and will post back with some info when it arrives.

The demo seems quite interesting from an advertising point of view though.  The example given on the Phorm site explains the process for advertisers.  You can for example, choose to display ads for a Paris hotel only to users who had browsed French travel sites using the keywords “France” and “Paris” (on page), at least 3 times in the past 30 minutes.

That opens up a world of options for advertisers – instead of customising a few campaigns with vague targeting on Adwords, you can customise entire campaigns to target users at different stages of the decision making process.  Frequent browsing could equate to a greater intent to buy – therefore you can target your juicy sales pages to these people.  On the other hand, infrequent browsing could indicate an interest in a new area, allowing you to target more subtle, informational pages at potentially new customers.

It also means we could target different types of customers who are looking for the same service.  A potential new client with no previous SEO services and an existing client of a competitor looking to change supplier could very well browse different types of sites, looking for different types of information – why not tailor campaigns specifically to each customer type?

However, the one constraint with a system like this is scope.  They have the technology to run the system on – they have the user data to sell to advertisers – do they have the content network to justify such a large remit?  That’s where small website publishers could really make or break the campaign.

Last note on this – one cool feature is that publishers can dictate a threshold fee for their ad real estate (i.e. a minimum price advertisers pay to advertise on the site).  I like the sound of that.

Any thoughts on either being able to track and market users at this level, or being tracked and marketed to like this?

Scott

This new scheme looks pretty cool and seems to be somewhat of a competing service to Google’s Universal Search / Local Search / etc.  Check out the screenshot on the Y! blog – basically it means your Yahoo! search results could include more features and deep links to your site, including reviews, photos, contact details and price information.

From the Yahoo! blog:

Because the platform is open it gives all Web site owners — big or small — an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

Not only is this an interesting (and pretty clever) move from Yahoo!, it also indicates a shift for the future of search and search engine optimisation.  I love the revised look for the Y! search results – I think this rolled out to the live SERPs would be a great change for Yahoo! and will most likely force the hand of MSN and Google who will need to keep up (although in fairness, Google has led the way in the past with new features like this).

It will take a bold step from any search engine to make the move from old school SERPs to new SERPs – Google have gone some of the way over the past year or two, but having been playing it relatively safe by keeping everything under the “beta banner”.

More doors opened though, means more ways for people to spam!  I know Google Local do keep a tight control of data that powers local results in listings – but that’s just a few big sites providing most of the information, with loads of small sites providing a small proportion of the listings.  By allowing webmasters to dictate so much data that will be reflected in live SERPs, Yahoo! could be setting themselves up for a lot of work to keep a solid level of quality control over the process. 

A lot of work?  Yes, but I do think it is entirely within the realms of any of the big search engines to manage this well – and I also really do think they should do it.  

For SEOs it could make for an interesting future.  More data to play with + more control over SERPs = great for us.  But think about it:  more data on page 1 = less people browsing to page 2 (or even to below the fold on page 1).  Where title tags influence click through rates now, user reviews, contact details and other supplementary information might influence CTR in the future.

Not a bad thing, but certainly may offer a larger challenge for the Internet marketing community.  What do you reckon?

Sign up for more information about the release here and WebmasterWorld discussion here.

Scott

(minor gripe – why do Yahoo! still have a link to Threadwatch on the blog roll?)

Sure, they no doubt spend a load on PPC and it could very will be killing off a reasonable source of business for you, but hey – it’s not like you’re all short of a buck or two now is it?

SEO agencies are responsible for spam.  Well, not all of them – there are a lot of good agencies out there.  But why should they be tarred with the same brush as other agencies who pimp dodgy, outdated techniques?  And why should their clients be the ones who suffer, not only losing money paying for this crap service, but losing business when you ban them?

So here’s the idea – get together, agree on a SEO agency spam list and completely kill them from your index so they can’t tout more business. Hey, they are basically selling ways of getting round your guidelines anyway so you’ll be better off getting rid of them (and I’m sure a few managed PPC accounts ain’t worth soiling your organic index).

So a client site gets banned.  They check some SEO forums to find out why and people tell them they’ve been naughty.  Or more accurately, their agency have been naughty.  So what can they do?  Nothing.  Not a damn thing.  They’ve just lost a shitload of money because search engines don’t disclose a lot of info about organic rankings.  Or they’ve been sold by a glossy sales pitch. 

Why not create an agency spam report feature?  Limit submissions to comments from sites who have been banned.  Ask for evidence (consultancy documents, invoices, etc) and ban the agency.  Simple.  The agency will find it very difficult to get more business without search engine listings for their own site and as such, less people will have their businesses hurt, and SERP’s will be all minty fresh and clean!

Search engines need to take more responsibilty for this industry that they (allbeit, unintentionally) have created.  Get your shit together.  More regulation is needed and right now, search engines are in the best position to do it.  Start hitting the spammers where it hurts.

MG

• Redesigned interface.
• Videos from many sources including user RSS feeds and major video publishers.
• “Channels” setup to allow users to view content produced / submitted by a common source.
• MyFavourites integration.
• Content distribution – videos can be pasted into web pages in blogs (let’s try that out).

OK my first thoughts – I still prefer Google Video search – more homepage options (Yahoo! Video seems to be more of an eBay / Amazon type feel to it).

Did a search for “comedy”.  Didn’t get spectacular results (compared to using Google Video’s comedy channel) – refined the search using the channel “underground film”.  Found some more promising results. Er found some dodgy porn results in the mix of some random comedy clips – thumbnail images and descriptions still live on results page (but Yahoo! have removed the actual film clips).

It seems only a few clips can be distributed (probably an option to turn this off when you submit) – so here’s a clip about street drumming for some reason Wordpress won’t let me add the code. :-/

Still prefer Google.

“The World Wide Web Conference is the global event to bring together the key influencers, decision makers, technologists, businesses and standards bodies shaping the future of the web.

Organised by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) (IW3C2) since 1994, the annual WWW Conference has played the fundamental role of gathering the trail-blazers from the international community to discuss, debate and explore how to shape and develop the future direction of the World Wide Web.”

The website has a lot of resources from the conference, including research papers, podcasts and a wiki for delegates.

Obviously the chat was much broader than solely affects the SEO industry, but there are a few interesting papers worth a read.

I’ve just had a look over the paper by MSN Research and UCLA – Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis, abstract:

“In this paper, we continue our investigations of “web spam”: the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines, to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit. This paper considers some previously-undescribed techniques for automatically detecting spam pages, examines the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and when aggregated using classification algorithms. When combined, our heuristics correctly identify 2,037 (86.2%) of the 2,364 spam pages (13.8%) in our judged collection of 17,168 pages, while misidentifying 526 spam and non-spam pages (3.1%).”

Not a great deal of tangible use for SEOs but it certainly gives the industry a better idea of how search engines are approaching spam.  The report looks at identifying how likely a page could be spam based on x, y or z factors, based on results from a sample of the MSN index.

Interestingly one of the points that the report brings up is the use of different TLDs for spam – .biz domains take the lead with a whopping 70% of domains being labelled as spam!  I expected that to take the lead but not by quite so much!  .us domains follow in 2nd place with 37%.

A thread on Threadwatch earlier labelled MSN’s results as being pretty spammy, which indeed they are.  But reports such as this one serve to prove that MSN aren’t the search newbies their results make them out to be, which lead to my comments on the thread:

“Google was the same way a few years ago and became the golden child of SEO (and as a result, also general business) and made billions in the process.

MSN can afford to give the online marketing industry an easy run for a while – much more these days SEOs are taking a “screw Google and work on MSN / Yahoo” approach (well, more affiliate type SEOs than agency / client based side). That’s a big change from a year ago.”

Are MSN trying to bait the online marketing industry to try and recreate the success Google saw through 2003 to date?  If anyone can, MSN can.

Also in the news, Google announced a partnership with Dell to provide a package of Google software on their PCs and Yahoo announced a partnership with eBay.

Looks like the search engine war has broken well out of the SERPs and is hitting the real world with a vengance.

MG

The jist of of it is that they are both trying to take various approaches to using user input to tailor and / or refine results.  Not exactly groundbreaking stuff – should have been done years ago.

I’ve wrote more about the launches in an article on my agency site.

MG