Shownotes Searchcowboys on Webmasterradio - episode 1

Shownotes

Below you can find the different topics talked about with related links.

The European Committee is said to be letting the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo sail through. The anti-trust agency in Europe presumably believesthey simply haven't got enough market share to be a legal threat. Google is just to big here!

Links to related stories:
http://www.searchcowboys.com/microsoft/905

Bing has been showing secret locations in Holland, which raised questions with politicians, who are all on holiday now by the way. Bing had taken pictures of military bases and royal palaces from the air for their maps service. However these locations should have been blurred but weren't.

Links to related stories:
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2059490/bing-toont-geheime-locaties.html (in Dutch!)

Bing's rivals Google are also as usual rolling out services like crazy. They rolled out Google insights for search in several European countries. You can now look at search trends and predections in 39 languages. That, by the way, doesn't mean the data is right away good, for languages like dutch there is still little data available.

Next to that Google als made some European adjustments to Streetview and Maps. Google Map Maker is now available for eastern european countries and we can look at Switzerland and Portugal in Streetview.

Links to related stories:
http://www.searchcowboys.com/google/900
http://www.searchcowboys.com/google/907
http://www.searchcowboys.com/local/899
http://www.searchcowboys.com/research/894

Just next to Switzerland is France and that country has a name of having a love/hate relationship with the US. That love hate relationship is now a little bit 'hate' because of a deal Google made with the French Librarians Association "Bibliotheque National de France". The deal allows Google to digitize and index 13 million booktitles in the French Library in Paris.

The french have been fighting Google for years believing they were the 'evil' ones. The decision to sell is purely a financial one, they need €80 million... The French government only would give 5 million a year. shows you how much money Google has...

Links to related stories:
http://www.searchcowboys.com/google/911
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6800864.ece
http://searchengineland.com/french-upset-over-google-library-deal-lawyer-author-files-new-arguments-against-book-search-settlement-24171

In the UK some interesting research has also been done. Hitwise calculated in the UK that Transactional websites are losing ground compared to content driven sites. Where in 2006 Transactional websites used to attract 5% more traffic than content driven sites, it has now completely turned around: content driven sites account for no less than 73% of traffic.

Links to related stories:
http://www.searchcowboys.com/research/894

It might have something to do with the economic climate we're in. That's somenting e-marketer believes when thet showed numbers of UK-buying habits. They do still estimate that 72.5% of UK Internet users above the age of 14 will buy at least one item online this year. In the years to come they expect a rise to 31.8 million online buyers.

Links to related stories:
http://www.searchcowboys.com/research/902

The Guardian this monday placed an article about an affiliate website which complained about not ranking well in Google.

Links to related stories:
http://www.searchcowboys.com/podcast/910
http://www.searchcowboys.com/search/909
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/17/google-search-baffles-internet-firm

There's something going on with the UK SERPS. Since the beginning of July the results are mixed up with US and Australian results.

Links to related stories:
http://econsultancy.com/blog/4229-are-google-s-uk-search-results-broken
http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/06/google-uk-mixing-in-us-based-queries.html
http://www.searchcowboys.com/google/716

Another SEO loophole closed Twitter closed an SEO Loophole: links in the footers "1 minute ago from TweetDeck" are no longer followed link

Links to related stories:
http://www.searchcowboys.com/seo/898

That's it! If youre on Twitter you can follow us: twitter.com/searchcowboys, chapter42 for Roy, basvandenbeld for Bas and off course webmasterradio and don't forget to follow BrascoatWMR!

Talk to you next week!