So What Is The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal, Exactly?

In a nutshell, the deal means that Yahoo search results and sponsored listings will be powered by Microsoft/Bing. Yahoo will still control the user interface and extra features (i.e. Shopping and news results) but the main search results and the PPC ads will be powered by Bing.

What Does This Mean For Bloggers?

There will be many changes due to this deal, but the 3 biggest that we’re aware of right now are:

1: You Need To Start Paying More Attention To SEO For Bing

Since Yahoo Search and Bing will be powered by the same algorithm, sites should perform about the same on both. In other words, if your blog is top ranked on Bing, you’ll be top ranked on Yahoo. (The press release implies that you’ll rank exactly the same on both search engines, but we’ll probably have to wait and see.) Together, Yahoo and Bing control 25% of the US search market. While that is less than Google’s 66%, it’s still a substantial market that you’ll certainly want to target.

Fortunately, Bing seems to want to make it easy for webmasters and SEO’s. They now offer a robust set of webmaster tools, with documentation, guides, and even forums where Bing team members will sometimes reply directly to questions at Bing Webmaster Center!

2: MSN AdCenter Will Have A Much Larger Reach

MSN AdCenter will have a greatly expanded reach, since sponsored results on Bing and Yahoo search will both be pulled from MSN AdCenter. If you have advertised on Google Adwords, but not on MSN or Yahoo due to the smaller search volume, you may want to change your tactic. While it won’t match Google’s market share, MSN Adcenter will have a greatly expanded reach that will be well worth your effort to utilize. Unfortunately, bid prices will probably also go up when more advertisers start using AdCenter.

3: Some Yahoo Tools Might Change Or Disappear

Several Yahoo tools used by marketers and webmasters, most notably Yahoo BOSS and Site Explorer, may be in danger. Only time will tell, as the Yahoo team keeps hinting that they may be able to keep these tools.

When Will This Happen?

According to the official press release, the deal is expected to be implemented in the US before the 2010 holidays. I’m just guessing, but I would imagine that means by October at the very latest. The release also said that they might delay implementation until 2011 “if they determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season.”

What We Don’t Know

There are many finer details we don’t know yet, such as how identical Bing and Yahoo results will be, whether certain tools will still exist, or if Bing/Adcenter will experience growing pains during this transition. But the bottom line is that Bing/Adcenter will now control a much larger market share – bloggers, SEO’s and advertisers should pay attention.

What Does The Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Mean For Bloggers?


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Valentine’s Day logo, year 2000

Valentine’s Day logo, year 2001

Valentine’s Day logo, year 2003

Valentine’s Day logo, year 2004

Valentine’s Day logo, year 2005

Valentine’s Day logo, year 2007

Valentine’s Day logo, year 2008

Valentine’s Day logo, year 2009

All Google images excerpted from the official Google logos inventory. You can also see this Google logos collection maintained unofficially by a Google fan.

8 Google Valentine’s Day logos from the past


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The new marketplace has a few ‘improvements‘ :

• Private Sales as an alternative to Auctions
• Customisable categorisation and powerful advanced search
• Automatic email notification of listings matching your search criteria
• More certainty with phone number verification required for everyone
• Site ownership verification required to give you confidence in what you’re buying
• Greater suite of verified site statistics
• View counters on all listings
• Simplicity
• New “Just Sold” and “Ending Soon” tabs
• New pricing model

It now costs $19 to list any site and a successful sales tax of 5%. They say this tax is capped at $499 though this is the most you will pay for any site sold over $10,000.

I think this is a good move from SitePoint and hopefully it will get a bigger audience and become a better service. Though recently the quality of sites being sold in the marketplace has been questionable.

I recommend checking the site out, at least to check out the fake auctions they have set up!

Links :
Flippa Homepage
Flippa Announcement Post

SitePoint Marketplace Becomes Flippa.com


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Bottom line: There are a lot of transactions going on in my PayPal account. So, I try to stay acutely aware of PayPal scams. However, with the worsening economy, there seems to be even more aggressive scammers out there. The following two caught me a bit off guard this morning.

PayPal Scam Alert

This morning, I logged into check my accounts and an email from “PayPal” caught my eye. The subject line was “Dispute Transaction” and the email address that showed in my inbox was “Service@PayPal.com”.

So I opened it and it said the following:

Dear PayPal Member,

This email confirms that you have paid robertoelectronics (roberto211@aol.com) $439.00 USD using PayPal. This credit card transaction will appear on your bill as “PAYPAL robertoelectronics*”.

Then, it had an official-looking PayPal invoice. At the end of the invoice it said:

If you haven’t authorized this charge, click the link below to cancel the payment and get a full refund.

Once I read this notice, I knew it was a scam. Why? Because PayPal doesn’t notify you of “unauthorized charges” and when they do contact you about a transaction, they do it from your account internally. IE, you have to be logged into your account to see any disputed transaction notices.

This is the first time I’ve received a PayPal scam email like this. Even though I knew it was a scam, I immediately logged into my PayPal account to see if someone had hacked it and wiped it out.

All was well with my account. Whew!

AssociatedContent.com Scam Alert

I also received a scam email notice this morning — ostensibly from AssociatedContent. This was a first also. It said the following:

The subject line was: Please confirm payments and PayPal email address‏
The “From” email address was: admin@associatedcontent.com

The notice said:

Before Associated Content can pay you, we need you to confirm your PayPal email address for the following payment(s). bonus $XX.XX Performance Bonus: December 2008

The address we currently have on file for you is: XXX (they had my correct PayPal address). To confirm this address, click here. For non-html email users, please paste this URL into your browser to confirm your PayPal email address:
https://xxxxxx/pay_confirm.shtml?user_id=xxxxx (they had an email address here that looked official)

To change your PayPal email address, log in to www.associatedcontent.com and click on “Update” from the top-right corner of the My Account tab. Important: After changing your PayPal email address, please click on the confirmation link above. We cannot send payment until your new address is confirmed.

As it’s around the time that AssociatedContent (AC) is to dispense my monthly payment for my articles there, if I had been less aware, I could have very easily thought this was a legitimate email from AC.

I logged into my AssociatedContent account just to check though and sure enough, all was fine. I didn’t need to verify anything; my payment was already in progress – as usual.

This was a very slick scam attempt as they had my PayPal payment address correct, and even the amount of my payment correct. But, I still don’t think this is an official email from AssociatedContent because they don’t ask you to verify account information in an email. This should always, always, always be a red flag.

Following is some concrete advice that will keep your PayPal funds safe 100% of the time.

How to Keep Your PayPal Funds Safe 100% of the Time

Never Click a Link in an Email: Never ever click a link in an email you receive – even if it does look like an official email from PayPal or another trusted source. Remember, never!

These are what’s known as phishing scams. The scammers want you to click through so that they can steal your log in information. Once you click to “verify” your information, they have all the info they need to go in and clean your account out.

Type in the Name of the Site Yourself: Always log out of any email that is asking you to verify account information (or some other such jargon), go to your browser and type in the name of the site yourself.

This way, you can be sure that you’re accessing the true site, not some mirror site that you’ll be directed to if you click a link in an email you’ve received.

Don’t Verify Anything: Legitimate sites like PayPal and AssociatedContent and your bank, etc. DON’T ask you to verify account information. After all, you signed up. They already have your info on file. They won’t be asking you for verification – and they would certainly never do it via email.

Tax Time Tip: As tax season is just around the corner here in the U.S., the IRS email scam will start soon. Remember, the IRS is a fuddy duddy organization. They don’t send out correspondence via email. So if you receive an email from the “IRS”, ignore it. They don’t send them out – ever.

When in Doubt, Contact the Company Directly: If you feel the need to address correspondence sent by a “company” (in quotes b/c it’s usually a scam), go to the site, log into your account and send an email or contact them via phone (if this is an option) directly.

Don’t help thieves steal your money. If you do these things, you will keep your PayPal funds – and other monied accounts – safe 100% of the time (excluding professional hackers — which is a whole other ball of wax).

New PayPal Scams: How to Keep the Money You’ve Earned Safe


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Google decided to launch the new browser via a comic. You can see the comic in full here and if you take the time to read it, you will see that it explains most of it’s new features (it’s 38 pages long!).

All in all it promises to be a much more secure browser which was designed from scratch for todays internet. In the past Google has been a huge contributor to FireFox so I’m sure this new browser will change their relationship. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing this browser in action

Link : Fresh Take on the Browser

Chrome : Google’s browser released tomorrow


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The site is different to Google in many ways. The site has a black background and search results are displayed within a frame. You can display results in 2 columns or in 3 and most results have a thumbnail image attached to it. You have the option of using ‘Safe Search’ and there is a typing suggestion tool too that you can use if you want. There is also a category box at the right hand side of results with some related tags to your search, a nice feature. Other than that though there’s not much else to Cuil, which is not a bad thing in my opinion.

I did notice that the images which are attached to results are all mixed up. For example, if you search for Blogging Tips you will see an image from Lorelle Van Fossen’s blog attached to BloggingTips.com and the old BloggingTips.com mascot attached to Lorelle’s listing. All the other images on the results page are mixed up too. Since Ciul is still really new this is forgivable and I’m sure they will fix this soon.

I would personally love to see more search engines stand up and challenge Google’s dominance and perhaps the time is right. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land agrees :

The time may be right for a challenger. Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.

In the past week Google has annoyed a lot of webmasters with the release of their new article site Knol, a site which sees Google enter the content market, something which competes with the websites which are listed in their results and something which they have said many times in the past they will not do. I don’t know your view on the subject but personally I don’t think Google should be entering this market as it’s a conflict of interests. The purpose of any search engine is to produce relevant search results to the user and with many people already proving that articles on Knol are getting high rankings after just a few days, it’s clear that they are not unbiased when it comes to SERP’s.

So can Cuil succeed? Can they take some of the market from Google? Well, it’s certainly no easy task. It’s a different world today than when Google entered it 10 years or so ago. Google now has partnerships with thousands of ISP’s across the world and with many popular browsers so that it is the default search engine for most people, not to mention the brand name they now have. I really do hope a site like Cuil can get some sort of market share though. A monopoly is not good for any industry and with Google having more than 90% of search engine traffic I’d say that some healthy competition is well overdue.

If you’re interested in using a different search engine I recommend giving Cuil a try.

Link : Cuil

Ex Google Employees Launch Rival Search Engine Cuil


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It will be interesting to see what Google does with Digg and whether they will integrate the service with Google more. Remember, they didn’t really mess with YouTube after purchasing it so it might not be integrated or promoted on Google with their other services.

Google to buy Digg for $200 million


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Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web.

I can only imagine their servers were under to cope with 8 million downloads in one day. Check out their world map which shows you which countries were downloading FireFox on that day. You might be surprised by the download figures for some countries

FireFox Breaks World Download Record


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I have seen a few sites reporting that FaceParty have put this offensive message to members because of the negative comments they were receiving from members. However, I am a little sceptical. It is more likely the site has been hacked or they are doing this to make the internet sit up and notice them (they’ve lost a lot of ground to FaceBook and Bebo).

The Wikipedia entry for FaceParty has already been modified to reflect this change today.

On June 24th 2008, Faceparty closed for an undisclosed period of time due to bad feedback and comments from members of the site. The site was closed with a message in its place stating the reason, but making no mention of exactly when the site would re-open. This kind of agressive tactic in dealing with negative feedback has recently become quite common on Faceparty, and users who have paid for Cool Tools or subscribed to the pay-monthly AVS feature prior to this temporary site closure are likely to be unhappy with this action being taken and many will be questioning the legality of the action on the basis that many paying members are being denied the services they are paying for with a very questionable justification from Faceparty itself. It is likely that many paying members will cancel their memberships if the site is down for an extended period of time, as Faceparty is highly unlikely to refund any of it’s members.

There is a chance that this notice may be taken down after a day or so. Therefore here is the message in full (click on the image to see it full)

(you can see an uncensored version of this image here)

Has FaceParty been hacked, are they trying to generate some buzz around their site or are they genuinely pissed off with members. I’m not sure however I’m sure we’ll find out over the next few days

Has FaceParty been hacked?


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There are two main ways to boost your trading rating. The first way is to add your telephone number to your profile. Once SitePoint has verified your number you will get a rating boost of 60%. The remaining 40% is determined by the positive and negative feedback you receive from trading within the marketplace (much the same as ebay).

This is a great addition to the marketplace and in my opinion, a feature which is very long overdue. The marketplace is a great place to keep tabs on if you want to pick up a domain name, website or template and while they still have a long way to go improve the service, this is definately a step in the right direction.

SitePoint introduces new trust system


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To coincide with the release Mozilla are trying to set a Guiness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours. I used Opera for years but switched my main browser to FireFox a year or two ago and haven’t looked back.

You can make a pledge to download the browser tomorrow if you like but it’s so near the release date I’m not sure if there’s much point! Can’t wait to see the improvements they have made and all the new features!

Link : Spread FireFox

FireFox 3 released


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Website statistics are now calculated using a wide range of sources. In their announcement they do not give much away as to the sources of their new data but I’m sure this will come out in the next few months.

I have never been a fan of Alexa as ratings can be manipulated very easily and it was incredibly unaccurate for non tech sites. Hopefully this new ranking system has changed this and Alexa will be useful as a basis for the traffic a site gets. Your blog’s Alexa ranking has probably been reduced but this is not something to be concerned about as most blogs and tech sites will have lower rankings (BloggingTips has went from about 40,000 to about 137,000).

You can read the official Alexa announcement here.

* Thanks to ProBlogger and TechCrunch for bringing this to my attention

Alexa improve rankings system


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• NetNewsWire 3.1
• FeedDemon 2.6
• NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0
• NewsGator Inbox 3.0 (beta)
• NewsGator Go! for Blackberry
• All of NewsGators online platform products (iPhone Reader, HTML Reader, etc.)

NewsGator is promoting its free suite of products saying they synchronize perfectly with their online programs for a ‘best-in-breed RSS reading experience’ (and yes, the copywriter in me agrees that is a terrible piece of copy, but I digress). 

How is NewsGator going to make up for that lost revenue?  Well, they have a new strategy in mind.  Their new plan is to start collecting attention data (or activity data) meaning they’re going to keep track of what their users are doing.  This is nothing new online, but it is new for NewsGator and their customers.  They also think that by offering their consumer products for free, they’ll be able to sell more of their NewsGator Enterprise Servers, but that’s another story entirely.

What do you think of the free NewsGator products?  Will you make the switch?  Many Google Reader and Bloglines users have a variety of complaints about those feed readers including being slow to update, etc.  NewsGator customers are typically very happy with the services not just from FeedDemon but all the programs the company offers.

If you’re already a NewsGator product user, leave a comment and let BloggingTips readers know what you think.  What have you found to be the pros and cons of being a NewsGator user?

NewsGator Consumer Products are Now Free


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They realised that Dmoz isn’t listed when you search for dmoz on Google. Fingers crossed that is an indication Dmoz is finally going to go to the website graveyard in the sky. Dmoz has been currupt for as long as I can remember, I once waited more than 2 years for my site submission to be accepted. This sort of timescale was the rule and not the exception.

The problems didn’t stop there. For example, ShoeMoney was recently dropped from the directory because he refused to give a Dmoz editor $5,000. Marketing Pilgrim reported that when another Dmoz editor read about ShoeMoney’s problem he tried to do something about it and his account was disabled!

Google has always given a lot of weight in their search results to sites which were listed in the directory so this is great news for anyone who runs a website

Link : The Open Directory’s Home Page Goes Missing In Google (via Marketing Pilgim)

DMoz could be getting dropped by Google – About frickin time!


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