I was doing some research on mortgage loans and to my surprise, I saw this. Is this something new or old news? Not sure, but I get this feeling that Google is going to enroach into the lead gen space and steal some serious cash.

I clicked on “Buy a home” and it brought me to:

Click on request Info and a popup appears to ask for your information.

Are you surprised that Google is doing this? I know they starting their own shopping engine to take on sites like Bizrate, Pricegrabber, shopping.com and others - but entry into the lead gen business appears to be super aggressive, and, well EVIL!

No wonder Google doesn’t use the phrase “do no evil” anymore these days

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

For many years, even during the time I was at Yahoo! doing SEO, their Paid Inclusion offering never made sense to me. This hybrid of organic search+paid search+directory-like approach has always ruffled feathers among search practitioners. Of course, depending on what department paid inclusion falls under, it could be a true blessing or a devil’s curse.

I’m just happy, if this is true, that websites will now have an even opportunity to rank in organic search in a truly “free” way.

Bartz killing Yahoo! one piece at a time. But this time, if this was her decision, is probably one I can stand behind because this service has been a major thorn on the sides of search marketers at different levels.

Read more about discontinuation of yahoo paid inclusion

A word of caution

I know that many companies in retail and hospitality rely heavily on Yahoo Paid Inclusion to acquire search engine traffic in yahoo search. It’s all over now! When Yahoo drops the axe, we will see a massive shift in traffic, site rankings and definitely ROI for many businesses.

Is your site prepared for this paid inclusion armageddon? Are you scrambling to figure out ways to prepare for a massive drop (end of 2009, hrmmm…isn’t that holiday season?)

Whatever it is - I would recommend you get your organic strategy in place and figure out how to improve your search position in Yahoo.  If Yahoo is 20% of your overall traffic now, expect it to drop 80%-90% if you solely relied on paid inclusion and ignored advise and suggestions from your in-house SEO team or content team. Of course this is assuming that your paid inclusion feed wasn’t optimized to reflect your actual site URLs.

So who really loves Paid Inclusion?

Depends who you ask and what department paid inclusion falls under. But overall, whichever the case, the days are numbered for this easy way of “ranking” in yahoo organic search.

I wonder how many paid inclusion providers are panicking…

It’s been a while since I last posted anything - to be exact since June 3rd 2009! But let’s not dwell on the absence of my posts, but rather what I’m about to write about. FUD Marketing. So what’s FUD? Do you FUD someone, or tell someone to FUD-off, or is it some sick version of F*** You D***head?

courtesy of: EclipseCon 09
Click here to read more

Some of you might recall me writing about a new game called Senket last month, something that I had absolutely no clue about. And since it is in my nature to refuse not understanding anything, I begged my friend, and creator of Senket, Geoff Canyon to sit down with me and give me the 30,000 ft. introduction to what Senket is all about, why he created it, what he thinks about the game and so forth. Click here to read more

If you remember my prediction about the demise of our postal service earlier this year, and people said I was either crazy, off my rockers, bonkers, ya know - the normal stuff people refer to me anyways - well, today I cam across another news story that supports my theory - that in 5 years our post office will fade away. Click here to read more

If you live someone in the United States and haven’t heard about Oprah and KFC’s joint venture to promote the colonel’s new grilled chicken, you must be living under a rock. Click here to read more

Let me start by saying that I have absolutely NO IDEA what the heck Senket is. And if you have no clue what Senket is either and wonder if it’s the name of a newly discovered creature (sounds like a cat huh?), the name of a lost tribe, or my childhood nickname - just stop!! It’s probably nothing you can associate with, neither can I. But it’s something you’ll want to learn more about. Click here to read more

I was doing some research online for prom-related terms and noticed something out of place in Google’s results. Maybe this has happened before or maybe this is even something that’s old and I’ve just been blind to. Check this out.

A search for perfect prom dress for serena returns listings with 3 line descriptions. I’m used to seeing 2 lines of text - but the 3rd line?

Here’s another example of a military search term that returned 3-lined descriptions.

Ok so in both cases the keywords were bolded - so does that mean the Google will be searching the entire document until it finds an occurance of almost every keyword and return sentences and snippets?

Anyone seen this before? Please - help me think I’m not crazy