SeoAlchemist

I must have done something in a past life that now requires me, as punishment, to write about the obscure politics of Yahoo’s corporate governance on an almost daily basis. Accordingly, a recount of board votes from last Friday’s Yahoo annual shareholder meeting found that the “no” votes against most of the current board membership, and most notably CEO Jerry Yang and Chairman Roy Bostock, had doubled.

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Sweat glistened down his chiseled, tan face. Clad in his trademark gold jersey and black sunglasses, the icon finally put the finish line where it belongs… behind him. Yet despite the obvious missing hardware—his bike—and his dismal 488th place finish, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France considered the race a success. He had his reasons.

Believe it or not, search marketers have a lot to learn from Lance Armstrong. For once, the above race wasn’t about the win. Instead, the fierce competitor laced-up to run the Boston Marathon for another reason entirely: Awareness for Livestrong, his non-profit foundation for cancer survivors. In the process, not only did he shift gears—from acquisition to branding—he also took the time to redefine success. Similarly, search marketers looking to leverage paid search for branding purposes would be wise to do the same.

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According to a new report from The Pew Internet & American Life Project, daily use of search engines is growing and starting to approach email usage levels. New research conducted by telephone among 2,251 US adults, age 18 and older, found that 49 percent of internet users use a search engine on a typical day, compared with 60 percent for email.

In 2002, Pew’s data showed that about 30 percent of people online used search daily.

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SmartMoney reports that Google has sold off the search marketing division of DoubleClick, Performics, to a French company named Publicis Groupe.

When Google purchased DoubleClick, they acquired Performics with it. Google promised to sell off the Performics division, due to the conflict of interest in owning such a company. Today, they sold it to Publicis Groupe.

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As much as I’ve enjoyed comedians poking fun at
John McCain’s ad
that uses Paris
Hilton to mock Barack Obama, even better
is a new fake ad where
Paris Hilton
herself takes on McCain. People are clearly turning to the web to find it
— Google Trends shows plenty of people seeking it in
a variety of ways. A quick
look at that below, how easily (or not) the video can be found on search
engines and the video itself.

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Today, the Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center is launching its first major update since its initial debut last fall. The Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s hub for their communication with site owners and the tools portion of that center now has new crawl issues reports, backlinks data, and download functionality. The Webmaster Center was first announced at Searchification in September and launched in November 2007 with a blog, discussion forum, and set of tools that give site owners insight into Microsoft’s crawl and indexing of their sites. Below more details about what’s launched today and how site owners can use the new data.

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The Google LatLong Blog announced the expansion of imagery for Google StreetView to include Japan and Australia. The post also said that images have been released for 30 new US cities, including New Orleans.

Europe is on the way but privacy hurdles need to be cleared first. Google recently introduced StreetView images for the Tour de France route and was just cleared by British government authorities to launch the service in the UK.

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Pretty sleazy stuff there Ed Dale. Thumbs down for you.

I created a chart comparing how Google handles the blocking of indexing and/or PageRank flow via robots.txt, robots meta tags and link rel=nofollow.

Google just launched Search Insights, a cool new research tool for data hounds. Have you tried it yet? What do you think of it? How does it compare to your favorite market research tools?