I recently spoke on the multivariate testing panel at eMetrics in San Francisco. You would think that I dropped a hand grenade into the room when I opined that the Taguchi Method was a bad fit for landing page testing. This is a well understood fact to anyone with a solid understanding of basic statistics. Unfortunately this seems to leave out most landing page testers… In the world of landing page testing there are two common mathematical approaches: A-B Split testing, and parametric Multivariate testing … [more]

There is a discussion at WebmasterWorld forums about Yahoo sending visitors to country specific versions of their homepage. So if you try and go to Yahoo.com from England or Germany you end up at the country specific version of the Yahoo homepage. Google has been doing this for a long time, interesting that it has taken this long for Yahoo to catch on and drive local traffic to their many country specific sites. Could this help international search numbers? [more]

Yahoo's Chairman of the Board Roy Bostock fired back a reply, on behalf of the beleaguered board members Carl Icahn has been trying to replace, stating Icahn had a "significant misunderstanding of the facts about the Microsoft proposal and the diligence with which our board evaluated and responded to that proposal". Icahn had sent an open letter to the board informing them of his intended proxy fight, Kevin Newcombe reported earlier today. Bostock's letter read: Dear Mr. Icahn: We are in r … [more]

The U.S. government charged a mother who allegedly used MySpace in a deadly hoax that drove her daughter's 13-year-old classmate (pictured here) to suicide with conspiracy. Missouri resident Lori Drew, after her daughter's schoolgirl fights with neighbor Megan Meier, 13, created a fake MySpace account to pose as a boy and flirt with Meier. When Drew began using her online identity to taunt Meier, the girl hanged herself. The boy Megan had been corresponding with on MySpace unexpectedly began calling … [more]

Yahoo announced today the general public availability of their SearchMonkey program. This is a program that has been in beta testing with limited partners. It allows the partner to provide Yahoo with structured data that provides advanced information about a web page. This information is then used by Yahoo to influence the presentation of organic search listing results for that page. This is a very powerful concept in that a modified search listing can surely influence click through rates. Imagine your sear … [more]

Yahoo has confirmed that billionaire investor Carl Icahn has initiated a proxy fight via an open letter to Yahoo's board of directors notifying them of his intention to replace the existing board with his own slate of directors. The proposed board includes: Harvard Law Professor Lucian Bebchuk; Frank J. Biondi, Jr., senior managing director of WaterView Advisors; John Chapple, president of Hawkeye Investments; investor and NBA team owner Mark Cuban; Adam Dell, managing general partner of Impact Venture … [more]

Recently, Yahoo announced SearchMonkey , which will allow developers access to open source to create applications for search results. Well, today is the day that developers finally get their hands on the tools to make that happen. There are two types of applications developers can build using SearchMonkey – Enhanced Results and Infobars. Enhanced Results take the current standard results and give them a makeover with a richer display. Links to results must remain intact (don't mess with those search r … [more]

Yesterday I published a post on the Search Engine People site titled 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company! . While the tactics mentioned may be enough to push some negative online mentions of you or your business to the second page of the search results or lower, in other cases they will not. The question then becomes; what else can you do when the initial tactics themselves aren't enough, and you've got a negative piece about you ranking in the search results for an i … [more]

Plaxo has signed an agreement to be aquired by cable giant Comcast, accoring to a post on the Plaxo blog . The two companies had previously been working together in partnerships, but have now decided that a permanent merger would maximize their efforts. Those efforts include a unified approach to mashing up tv and social media. For example, one of the goals includes photo sharing across a variety of mediums including mobile, tv and computer. Plaxo is known for its online address books that have been instrum … [more]

Nielsen Online has released data showing that Wikipedia's 8,000% growth in the past 5 years is attributed to search. Really? Is that what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1? I had no idea. Breaking down the not-at-all suprising data: Google sent the most search traffic to en.wikipedia.org with 61% of searches on home computers and 66% of work computers. Yahoo came in second at 19% home, 16% work. The main www.Wikipedia.org came in third, beating out MSN and AOL at home and search.MSN.com … [more]

IAC-owned Ask.com has agreed to acquire Lexico Publishing Group, the owner of Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com. The move will help Ask.com fulfill its recent strategy to focus on reference and providing answers to questions. More than half a billion monthly worldwide searches consist of dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia queries, according to comScore. The acquisition brings to Ask.com 15.6 million monthly unique users, growing 29% year-over-year, giving the combined entity more than 14 … [more]

Yahoo may need to fight off Carl Icahn Syndrome by Proxy today. Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSP) is a type of factitious disorder which appears strikingly similar to the Icahn strategy. MSP is a mental illness where a person acts as if an individual he's caring for has a physical or mental illness when the person is not really sick. Is Yahoo sick? No. That won't stop dissident investors, though, from acting as if the company is. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who's invested more than a billi … [more]

eMarketer is lowering projections for social network advertising from $1.6 billion to $1.4 billion for 2008. Two reasons are attributed to the adjustment: a slowing economy and the uncertainty over what advertising actually works on social sites. Adjustments have been made for site-specific projections as well. MySpace's projection has been lowered from $850 million to $755 million, while Facebook has been lowered from $305 million to $265 million. Related Reading: Consumers Ok with Social Ads, But Rare … [more]

Talented link developers are hard to find — you want to retain them as long as possible. In today's Link Building column, " Keeping SEO Staff Motivated and Driven ," Justilien Gaspard offers tips on some incentives you can use to keep your link marketers productive and driven, while reducing staff turnover. [more]

While Google has dominated the search market , it's Yahoo that's been the leader as a destination site (think email, photos, etc.), according to published reports . But the tide is turning in that field, as comScore reported Google sites finally overtook Yahoo sites in the month of April. But unlike its lead in search, this lead is a slight one. Only 466,000 visitors separate the #1 and #2 slots in this field. Here's the raw data for April: Google sites saw 141.1 million visitors, up 18% year ov … [more]