Research by Scores.org

Labels: Google

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On any given year, there is big news in one of the measured categories, but this year, we have big news in all three!

• Social Media: This is the first year the ACSI has measured social media sites, and the results are surprisingly terrible. With an average score of 70, social media has the lowest industry aggregate score of any of online industries measured by the ACSI. Wikipedia leads the social media industry with a score of 77, and YouTube comes in at 73. Industry darling Facebook registers a score of 64, only one point above MySpace (63). Facebook and MySpace have scores so low, the only other companies measured by the ACSI with such low scores are airlines and cable companies.
• News and Information Sites: The big news in this industry is the debut of FoxNews.com at the top of the heap with a score of 82, which is five points above nearest competitor USAToday.com (77) and well ahead of other cable news providers MSNBC (74) and CNN.com (73). NYTimes comes in at 76. FoxNews registers the highest score ever received by any news organization in the ACSI. If I were Fox, I’d be using this in my media kit, because high satisfaction leads to high return visits and loyalty, which means more eyeballs for ads on FoxNews.com.
• Portals and Search Engines: Customer satisfaction with portals and search engines dives 7% to 77 this year and is driven largely by a 7% decline for Google (down six points to 80). Bing was measured for the first time this year, and it makes a strong first showing with a score of 77, second only to Google. What do you think, can Bing actually compete with Google?

You can download the free report here: http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-report-2010.shtml or catch me on Twitter (@larryfreed) with any questions about the findings.

Labels: Facebook, Google, voice of customer

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Labels: comScore, Google

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With Facebook growing to well over 400 million users, their rise is happening all around the world. For instance, outside of China, Iran, Japan and Russia, Facebook has reached the top 20 ranked sites across many of the top online nations. Google is basically #1 across the board with Twitter climbing on many fronts as well.

Labels: Facebook, Google, Twitter

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1. Threshold queries based on volume and delta: This includes triggering queries like [Lost] to show Real Time results on premier/finale night. We algorithmically notice a large delta for this query compared to perhaps yesterday, or earlier in the week. When [lost] reaches a certain threshold, we understand that Real Time results may be most relevant for the user.
2. Common queries for Real Time results: This includes political queries and the like -- things that are constantly talked about and where freshness and/or a variety of sources may be helpful to the user.

Real Time information on Google is even better searchable. For certain queries, you can actually replay the conversation about a topic. I think this may be the only searchable, replay-able, public archive of tweets.

[Manoj]: What feature of Webmaster tools is your favorite?

[Maile Ohye]: Picking a favorite feature is pretty difficult for me. It’s like picking my favorite niece (I love them all!). One feature I definitely feel goes under-recognized, though, is HTML suggestions. HTML suggestions tells you what pages have duplicate HTML titles and meta descriptions (which are often used in your snippet).



This is actionable data. In getting a handle on whether your site has duplicate content, I'd first run a few site: queries, like [site:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com microformats], to see if Google had serve-time filtered duplicate results. Next, I'd go straight to HTML suggestions. Pages with duplicate titles and snippets are likely complete duplicate content.

At SES New York a few months ago, I gave a more in-depth presentation on duplicate content, multiple sites, and how to address the issues. I'll try to film that presentation in mid-June (when I'm back from the SES Toronto keynote), and I'll write a related post on our Webmaster Central Blog just in case people find the information useful.

[Manoj]: For a brand new site, would a site owner see quicker indexation of their site with an XML sitemap vs. without?

[Maile Ohye]: An XML Sitemap is a great way to maximize your site's exposure to our crawlers. Once crawled, your site can be indexed. Once indexed, your site can be returned to users in search results. So yes, submit a Sitemap if you can.

Furthermore, when you submit a Sitemap, Webmaster Tools then displays the number of URLs from your Sitemap that are indexed. Win-win.

[Manoj]: What types of improvements are you guys hard at work at?

[Maile Ohye]: As for improvements, Webmaster Tools Message Center is only going to get better. If you're a verified site owner, I'd recommend setting up email forwarding of our messages. We currently notify site owners of certain violations of our webmaster guidelines, or when we crawl infinite spaces, or information about malware on their site.

Having a communication channel between us at Google and the opted-in, verified owner of a site has truly huge potential. Excitement mounts... music quickens... stay tuned!

Labels: Google, Search Engine Strategies

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Labels: Google

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Labels: Google, HitWise

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Labels: Google, Mobile

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Labels: Facebook, Google, HitWise

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Labels: Google

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• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.
• Pingdom Tools: Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
• Webpage Analyzer: Their script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component
  

Labels: Google

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• Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News.
• Among this sample of News and Media websites, Facebook users are more likely to be repeat visitors than those coming from Google News or the average for the site.
• To offer one example, 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.

Labels: Facebook, Google, HitWise

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Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike.

Labels: Google

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• Google gave 1.8 million shares to Stanford University for the exclusive license of PageRank
• 620 Million Visitors go to Google.com Daily
• 50% of Google's products originated from "20% Time"
• 270,000 words written per minute on Blogger
• There are 146 Million Gmail Users

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• Twitter
• MySpace
• Google Buzz
• News sites

Ranking Factors for Google's Real-time Algorithm

• Author quality
• Probability of relevance
• Semantics
• Real-time URL resolution
• Query hotness
• Query volume fluctuation
• Topicality

What webmasters should know: Pay attention to the mechanics of SEO but don’t overdo it.

Labels: Google, real time

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For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both.

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
  Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange's "dynamic allocation" feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks.

Labels: Google

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Labels: Bing, Google, HitWise

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Labels: Bing, Google, Yahoo

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With the release of the Chrome beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it was only a matter of time before Safari was passed by. December makes it official. Chrome is now at 4.63 percent of browser share, followed by Safari at 4.46 percent. Safari appears to have plateaued at around 4.5 percent of total share. - the Apple Blog

Labels: Google, safari

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...we're bringing Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together. Now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login. Once signed in, your Twitter profile will be automatically linked and you can tweet your new site membership, share discussions from the comments gadget, and invite your friends via Twitter.

Labels: Google, Twitter

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