Google Introduces Country Domains On Blogger To Aid Content Removal - DotTechnologies

The decision by Google appears to precede a move by Twitter to selectively delete messages in some countries.

Google is directing users to localized country domains on Blogger to provide it flexibility to comply with content removal rules in various countries.

 The move suggests that Internet companies are coming to terms with the need to follow local rules, as they try to gain users in countries where there are concerns about pornography, and certain political and religious content.

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Google's update on Jan. 9 came ahead of Twitter's controversial decision last week to withhold certain content from users in a specific country, when required by local laws, while keeping it available to the rest of the world.

Over the coming weeks, users might notice that the URL (uniform resource locator) of a blog they are reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or ccTLD, Google said on a support page on Blogger that was first noticed by the news site Techdows.

"Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law," Google said. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD, it added.

Google is facing legal action in India in connection with content on its sites that is said to be objectionable. The Indian government in January allowed a court in Delhi to prosecute Google, Facebook, and 19 others, after Vinay Rai, editor of a local newspaper, filed a suit alleging objectionable content on their websites. Google had meanwhile appealed the lower court order before the Delhi High Court.

The Indian government has also demanded that Google and others should evolve mechanisms to quickly remove online content considered objectionable under Indian law.

But the feature on Blogger is part of a global rollout, and has little to do with the current situation in India, said a source close to the situation, who requested anonymity.

Services like Blogger, YouTube and Google+ help users to express themselves and share different points of view, Google said in a statement on Thursday. Where content is illegal or breaks Google's terms of service, the company will continue to remove it, it added. Google did not respond to a request for comment whether the changes on Blogger were linked to the court decision in India.

Google's YouTube also restricts access to content by IP address, citing the requirement of some content partners to make their videos available only to certain countries. It also blocks specific content in order to comply with local laws in countries where YouTube has launched. "For instance, certain Nazi imagery is unlawful in parts of Europe," according to a YouTube support page.

French Court Fines Google $660,000 Because Google Maps Is Free - DotTechnologies

Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free.

                                                        

According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.”

Bottin Cartographes provides mapping services for a cost, and its website boasts several business clients such as Louis Vuitton, Airbus and several automobile manufacturers.

The French court ruling requires Google to pay $660,000 (500,000 Euros) in damages and interest to Bottin Cartographes, along with a 15,000 Euro fine. That means Google’s total cost from the ruling is about $680,000.

A Google France spokesperson says the company is still studying the court’s decision and reviewing its options, adding that Google is “convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites.”

As you can see from the related stories listed below, this is far from the first time that the French have raised legal issues with Google.

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee

Google, Bing & Yahoo In Partnership To Sell Top Organic Local Listings - DotTechnologies

A new service offered by Bruce Clay Inc. called Local Paid Inclusion should raise a few eyebrows in the search marketing community – if there's any truth to it, that is. Officially in alpha, according to backend partner Universal Business Listings, the LPI program will offer top organic rankings in local listings for a fee, sources told Search Engine Watch.

UBL’s Doyal Bryant told SEW in a phone interview that the service is on hold, at the very least until next week, while the organizations test and troubleshoot.

However, both Google and Bing strongly deny any such program is in development.

"We are not working on any program that enables a site to pay to increase ranking in organic search results," according to a Google spokesperson.

Bing also denied taking part in such a program.

"Bing is not working on the Local Paid Inclusion program and would not consider giving preferential treatment to advertisers in organic search results," according to a Microsoft spokesperson.

Now UBL is also denying any involvement:

Universal Business Listing denies any association with articles and news reports about a "paid inclusion" business listing service. The company has made no such announcements or claims, particularly in regards to Google. It has no product announcements pending.

Bruce Clay Inc is a reseller of UBL's existing business listing syndication service and is not currently testing any new service from our company.

One program partner explained to Search Engine Watch how it will work:

“Using Google as an example, a local business in the ‘organic places’ area can pay a small monthly fee and this program moves them to the top area of the Places results. So essentially, it creates a premium section at the top of the Places results that never before existed, and a local business can pay a fee to appear in that area. As a result, whenever Places appears on the first page of Google results, and you are in the Local Paid Inclusion program, you should appear in that area of the first page of Google results.”

                        

The Local Paid Inclusion website, owned by Bruce Clay, states:

    “In January of 2012 we were approached to participate in a new and exciting program: Local Paid Inclusion (LPI). We’re offering it directly to local businesses, to chains of businesses, to resellers and through large distribution channels. We have an exclusive agreement to distribute LPI to domain registrars.

    Local Paid Inclusion is a Google, Yahoo and Bing official service that is offered as an approved official contracted program in cooperation with those search engines. This is a program supported by the search engines directly - and you can order it here. The search engines do not sell this directly.”

The website also has pricing information:

    The paid inclusion prices are based upon value: First page local results rankings for an average of less than $1.70 per day. If Call Tracking is involved that call fee is extra. This fee covers up to 30 keywords appropriate to your profile page and business, making the fee about $0.06 per day per keyword... less expensive than PPC and definitely higher impact because it is in the organic results area of the search results page.

We have confirmed that the paid listings are categorized as organic and will not be marked paid, advertising, or sponsored. They should blend seamlessly with organic local listings. This offering is not connected with Google’s AdWords Express program or other similar programs offered by others in the arrangement, but creates new space for LPI program listings.

“It’s a really exciting program, when we’re ready we’ll start talking about it,” Bryant told us earlier today.

This arrangement raises a few important questions:

    * Should search engines profit from the sale of organic listings?
    * Should this type of paid advertising be marked as such?
    * How does paid organic inclusion affect the quality of local listings, when paid listings can outrank those chosen for the top spot based on relevancy, geography, ratings, or other factors?
    * Hasn’t paid inclusion died a slow death a few times already?

For now, there are more questions than answers. As it stands, the players have been dragged into the limelight on this one kicking and screaming, you could say; the search engines involved are reportedly working out technical issues and did not want the program announced for another two to three weeks.

We reached out to Google, Bing and Yahoo to ask why the program was awarded in an exclusive contract, rather than through an internal program or some other kind of open, premium listings offer. We will update this article as we hear back.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to include statements from Google, Bing, and UBL.

Microsoft Sets Office 15 Public Beta For Summer 2012 - DotTechnologies

Microsoft today announced it has kicked off a "technical preview" of the next version of its money-making Office suite and promised a public beta will ship this summer.

                                                

The move is a repeat of the route Microsoft took with Office 2010, which was distributed to a select group of testers as a technical preview in July 2009.

Microsoft said little about "Office 15," the code name for the product, and nothing about its Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint applications in a blog post Monday that announced the preview.

"I'm not able to share too much about Office 15, but I can tell you Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division," wrote P.J. Hough, the executive who leads the Office division. "With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio."

Hough said the Office 15 technical preview was "already full," but added that "everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer."

He did not specify a date or set a month for the beta's availability.

Three years ago, Microsoft began the technical preview of Office 2010 in July 2009, followed that with a public beta in mid-November and launched the final product in April 2010. The suite hit retail shelves in June 2010.

If Microsoft follows a similar pace, it will release an Office 15 beta in late May or early June, wrap up the final code in October or November, and start selling the suite in December 2012 or January 2013.

Unless Microsoft changes Office's naming convention for Office, it will be called "Office 2013," as the two previous editions of the suite -- Office 2007 and Office 2010 -- actually shipped in the year prior to the one used in their titles.

It's possible, of course, that Microsoft has a faster release cadence in mind, and will ship the next Office alongside Windows 8 -- which most experts expect to see in October -- to duplicate the simultaneous launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007 in November 2007.

Microsoft may have required the invitation-only testers to sign a nondisclosure agreement that bars them from sharing secrets about the new suite, but that may not stop the unfinished code from leaking to others: Copies of the Office 2010 preview appeared on file-sharing sites even before Microsoft officially opened the program.

The company has not pegged the system requirements for Office 15, but it's possible that the new suite will not run on the decade-old Windows XP because that operating system is slated for retirement in April 2014.

Office 15 refers to the numbering system Microsoft uses to identify each edition: Office 2010 on Windows and Office 2011 on the Mac, for instance, are both labeled as "Office 14." Microsoft skipped "Office 13," jumping from 12 (Office 2007) to 14 (Office 2010) to avoid the unlucky number.

Office is one of Microsoft's biggest sources of both revenue and profit: In the fourth quarter of 2011, the Business division, which is responsible for Office, accounted for 30% of all revenues and 52% of all operating income.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at Twitter @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed Keizer RSS. His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

The debate about what should — and shouldn’t — show in a Google search result for “santorum” has been well-documented, at this point. But I’d like to use this now famous search to illustrate something else: how it appears Google is taking its eye off the ball of being a search engine.

Searching For Santorum: A New Surprise

I did a search for santorum a few minutes ago, and this is what I got:

See the YouTube link showing up there? It helps illustrate all that I think many people are feeling is wrong with Google right now. It’s a pretty bad result, and it’s also something getting there probably because Google’s not catching some potential old-school search engine spamming.

Universal Search Picked This?

The video result is showing up as part of Google Universal Search. That’s a system that blends content from Google’s various “vertical” or specialized search engines into its regular search results. It’s only supposed to inject this type of specialized content if it’s deemed especially relevant to the search topic.

Certainly, you can imagine that there’s video content relevant to a search on “santorum” from across the web. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report alone have over ten different Santorum comedy clips that might all be relevant.

Beyond comedy, there are news reports from across the entire web. The same search at Binggives some examples of this, of how video content from Bing Video, as well as Fox News and CNN is inserted into its own search results for “santorum,” as you can see here:

Out of 20,000 potential matches on YouTube, out of 21 million potential video matches across the web, what does Google’s supposedly sophisticated Universal Search algorithm pick out to display as the top video content to be shown within the top search results?

A cartoon created by a company pitching its SEO software on YouTube as a way for Santorum to solve his Google problem. Wow.

You Couldn’t Have Picked….

That’s the most relevant thing that Google can show? I think most people would agree it’s not. I mean seriously, it’s better than these?

• Any of the Colbert Report or Daily Show clips
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum arguing with a student on gay marriage
• Dan Savage explaining how his campaign against Rick Santorum ultimately caused searches on Google and Bing to show a definition as “santorum” being related to anal sex

You Couldn’t Have Caught A 65% Like Ratio?

It’s embarrassing for Google to be doing this. And it’s worse when you look at the views the video has received: only about 2,000, at this point. That’s nothing compared to some of the other clips relevant to santorum, if you’re considering views to be one possible ranking factor. How does this video get such a boost?

Well, there’s another clue when you look at the number of likes the video has received: about 1,300, at this point. That means about 65% of people who viewed the video also liked it, a ratio that is hugely out of proportion to what you normally see.

For example, the classic Honey Badger video — which is hilarious — has a like ratio of 0.5%. How about the classic Double Rainbow video? Hey, 0.5% again. The Bedroom Intruder song? A tiny bit better, 0.6%.

Either this SEO tool video is something like 130x more likeable than any of these other videos or something abnormal is happening — something that you’d think Google’s spam detection systems would have flagged.

Can I Haz My Relevancy Back?

In this particular example, the poor relevancy isn’t caused by any of the ongoing Google+ification of Google. This result is what anyone would see, even if they are logged out of Google. It’s not caused by Search Plus Your World or anything like that.

But Google has spent so much time and energy shoving Google+ into seemingly every nook and cranny that it can find that this type of relevancy screw-up feels like another bit of evidence that Google’s original core mission, delivering awesome search results, is being forgotten.

Internet marketing is the new age marketing tool. More and more companies are connecting with their consumers with the help of this marketing strategy. Further, to gain popularity on the web, two most central tools for Internet marketing are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media marketing. Both the above strategies involve a depth of expertise and can be perfected over time. As SEO professionals, we have listed out the aspects of both the tools to show a comparison.

Search Engine Optimization is the technique by which a Search Engine can lead users to your website by ranking it higher than others in response of the user query.

On the other hand, Social Media Marketing involves the use of social networking websites, communities and/or blogs to reach out to potential customers or users online. It is a relatively newer tool as compared to SEO, but is fueled by the immense growth in popularity of Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg, Foursquare, Youtube, Flickr and many others.

SEO and Social Media Marketing

SEO enables users who are looking for specific information to locate your website easily. This can increase chances of targeting the right audience as per your marketing goal. The benefits of doing SEO are vast but they require time and dedication, and often need the assistance of a SEO professional.  As a business owner, you may like to concentrate on other business processes instead.

The use of social media gives you a chance to expose yourself to a wide audience. Your business can gain popularity if it becomes a ‘trending’ topic on various websites. Users show their loyalty/appreciation for a brand by ‘Liking’ on Facebook, ‘Retweeting’ on Twitter, ‘Sharing’ on Youtube and other such actions on various networking sites. One follower can lead to many more as friends and friends of friends get updates of a persons likes and preferences. You also can build a community that would comprise the target audience of your product/service. You can follow it up with providing updates and information. Social Media Marketing does not have any cost unless you want to opt for the paid promotions. The biggest upside of Social Media Marketing is that people trust what their friends and acquaintances recommend.

Current Trends

There are benefits involved in both and as a business owner; the right mix is what works best.  As SEO professionals, we have listed the ongoing trends in the world of Internet Marketing below.

1. The popularity of Search Engines cannot be doubted. Google remains the number one search engine and it is said that 80% users are more like to use Search Engines while looking for specific information.
2. Year 2010 and beginning of year 2011 has seen a huge leap in the use of Social Networking websites. More and more businesses have formed online profiles and communities to reach out to consumers.
3. There has been a significant increase in use of Smartphones which enable users to have constant connectivity with the happenings and trends around them
4. A portion of consumers is ready to pay for exclusive information and reports that can hap them make decisions. Although in most cases users are spending a meager amount, there is vast potential for providing paid services like music, news, whitepapers, expert opinions, software and applications for mobile and other such services.

While you understand the importance of the above marketing tools, you must be ready to provide such content that is relevant, simple and concise. Once the process starts, it is an ongoing commitment, which must be carried on as long as the business functions. It should be given utmost importance on a regular basis and not just when you are launching a new product or service. We suggest you to make use of measuring tools like Google Analytics and Bit.ly as we did for SEO Vancouver, it will surely help you to monitor and focus on your marketing goals.

New age marketing involves the use of Search Engine Optimization and Social Media. Both are cost effective measures and have their own benefits. The use of these tools can help you expand your consumer base and build relationships with existing and new customers.