At the time, the .net & .org were available aswell as the .co.uk and nobody had built a brand around the name ‘PPC blog‘ in the same way there were seo blogs seemingly everywhere.

About 2+ years ago when I developed this site for a little fun the ppcblog.com domain used to redirect over to payperclickblog.com and the site was aptly named after that domain. This was great as I always wanted to work with the shorter url and ‘brand’.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book is however the owner of the domain which his wife Giovanni and he have decided to develop in the past week, seperate and away from the payperclickblog.com domain.

Aarons SEO Book is a fantastic resource, so I have no doubt this new site will be equally full of great regulary updated content. Regular enough to stay in the Toprank search marketing blog list (ping) which I got kicked from for not updating regulary enough…

As I have never really had a goal for this site other than to share random thoughts, have a nice testing platform for ideas or vent frustration it doesn’t bother me that it shares the same name. But it does highlight the importance of getting all the TLD’s you can if you want to establish yourself globally and block out competition.

Geographical filters are pretty strong, unless you are a high authority domain and in my view you still can’t rely completely on Googles Webmaster Central (and others) to set geotargetting for the sub directory/folder route. Getting all relevant TLD’s for each country in my opinion can still be the safest way to go. Which I might expand upon in another post as I am going off subject.

Anyway, so don’t get confused guys with your .coms and .co.uks – or do and I might get more traffic. ;)

I don’t know what happened, I am looking at this purely from a business point of view.

You see the peak in traffic for Search Engine Watch around November 06?. No coincidence this is around the time Danny Sullivan left SEW. It’s interesting to see that SEW traffic from this point has pretty much halved and both sites actually follow similar trends from this point.

I know to many in the industry that this would seem a given or obvious. But still, its amazing what one person can do to a business.

Check out this comprehensive list of 250+ search marketing blogs over at the Online Marketing Blog. There’s a couple in there I will be bookmarking.

Great resource linkbait.

WebProNews draws on comScore figures that show online retail spending surpass the $100 billion mark, up by 24% in 2005, with the holiday season spend up by $5 billion (26%) to that of last year.

The 12 highest holiday spend by day were -

1 Wednesday, December 13 $666.9

2 Monday, December 11 $660.8

3 Monday, December 4 $647.5

4 Friday, December 8 $638.2

5 Thursday, December 14 $634.4

6 Wednesday, December 6 $630.6

7 Thursday, December 7 $629.4

8 Friday, December 15 $623.9

9 Tuesday, December 12 $619.8

10 Tuesday, December 5 $612.3

11 Tuesday, November 28 $608.2

12 Monday, November 27 $607.6

So were you properly prepared for the rush back in November?

Keeping the 10 reasons Shoemoney gave short and sweet, they are;

1. The Search Algorithm
2. Overture Yahoo Search Marketing
3. Yahoo Publisher Network
4. Flikr
5. Del.icio.us
6. The People
7. Video
8. Community Properties
9. Business Directory
10. Yahoo Just Cleaned The House (reshuffle)

Will it happen? To me it seems like a no brainer… If Microsoft hopes to compete in this new internet economy (contextual ads) they need a bigger chunk of the search market. Yahoo is the only option IMO.

What do we think?

I mean, where is the content? Just take a look at the latest news posts today and yesterday as an example. Where is the news?!..

On the other hand Search Engine Land seems to be firing out news stories. The SEW blog has a single post on the 8th, Search Engine Land has 7 seperate news entries in the same period.

You could argue that its a transitional period for them, but its not as if they haven’t had enough time to plan & prepare for the change. They needed to speed out of the blocks & confirm to everyone that they are not going anywhere; instead they have come out and asked everyone how they should move forward!.

I have been away from the blog for about a week and there’s been loads of news about which I have missed. But, some things never change. Take Yahoos top 100 searches for 2006, which showed that ‘Britney Spears’ was the top search for the 5th time in 6 years.

“Why she keeps ranking top… is beyond me,” said Cathi Early of Yahoo. She said: “I don’t think people are just sitting in front of their computers looking for Britney.”

Well it’s amazing what a divorce and no knickers can do for you I guess.

The rest of the top 10 searches were made up mostly of celebs to -

1 Britney Spears
2 WWE
3 Shakira
4 Jessica Simpson
5 Paris Hilton
6 American Idol
7 Beyonce Knowles
8 Chris Brown
9 Pamela Anderson
10 Lindsay Lohan 

Disappointed with society?!

I said earlier that I, Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz would be writing here on Search Engine Land when it formally launches on December 11. I’m happy to now add that we’ll be working with correspondents: Phil Bradley, Bill Slawski, Jennifer Slegg, Brian Smith, and Greg Sterling. We’re glad to have them aboard!

I bet Incisive wish they got their cheque book out…

Discussion over at Threadwatch.

What’s Search Engine Land?

Search Engine Land is a new search news blog launching December 11, 2006. Danny Sullivan, along with Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz, will be providing information about search engine marketing and how search engines work in general, from a searcher’s perspective. At launch, the site will provide:

* Original content covering developments in the search space.

* Daily blog posts covering search news from across the web.

* SearchCap: A daily email newsletter recapping search news from Search Engine Land and across the web. Also available by feed.

* SearchCap Monthly: A monthly email newsletter recapping search news over the past month. Also available by feed.

* A fresh, clean look — complete with logo. What you see here is NOT how the site will look December 11!

So what will this mean for SEW? Discussion over at Threadwatch.