Online Marketing Trends

I just got an reply from WebPosition in reply to my email concerning the risk of being banned from Google (and other search engines) by using their automatic search engingerank checking mechanism. See my earlier post of today about this topic.

Hello,

We do not have a contract with Google, or any other search engine company. Some search engines, like Google, have concerns with automated querying, some do not. As a result, we have designed WebPosition with the ability to do both manual and automated queries. In other words, if you are concerned, we recommend that you do submissions and report queries manually, and not in an automated or scheduled fashion. We also highly recommend a few additional considerations for responsible use of WebPosition:

Consider how often you are running reports on your search position.
Given that many engines do not index more often than monthly, this may be as often as you need to run reports. Run reports only as absolutely necessary to respond to market changes.

Consider running your reports overnight and in off-peak hours.
Consider how many keywords you are analyzing. Only run reports for the number of keywords you realistically think you can optimize for in a given time period.

Use the “Responsible Best Practices” tab in the reporter and Submitter modules of WebPosition to help guide your activities. This feature will provide guidance on best practices for responsible use of WebPosition.

If I can be of further assistance, please let me know.

Best Regards,

Richard Drawhorn
Customer Support
WebPosition by WebTrends

In some way it still surprises me that a professional company markets a product that does not comply the Google Terms of Service. These terms state:

No Automated Querying

You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system without express permission in advance from Google. Note that “sending automated queries” includes, among other things:

• using any software which sends queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage “ranks” on Google for various queries;
• “meta-searching” Google; and
• performing “offline” searches on Google.

Please do not write to Google to request permission to “meta-search” Google for a research project, as such requests will not be granted.

I am interested to know what Google thinks about this kind of software.

Google has published their yearly Google Zeitgeist in which they look back to the most popular search queries in different categories. It does not impress me that itunes and wikipedia are among the most popular keywords of 2005. It’s interesting to see that both offline and online products score well and that sensation makes you wanna search (Janet Jackson, Tsunami, Katrina etc..)

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005/phenomena.html

Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that over 60 million American adults use a searchengines on a typical day:

Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.

Other important information from the report shows that Google really isn’t the only searchengine that is alive:

The latest data from comScore show that Google was the most heavily used search engine in October 2005 with 89.8 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo! Search (68 million unique visitors), MSN Search (49.7 million unique visitors), Ask Jeeves (43.7 million unique visitors), and AOL Search (36.1 million unique visitors).

Read the full report here:

http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SearchData_1105.pdf