If you are connected with Search Engine Optimization or Marketing you might find a new product released by Google recently quite useful. And even if you are not you still might have lots of fun digging it. A product I’m speaking about now is Google Trends – a fast and easy way to get to know and compare search volume of the word you’re interested in.

Google Trends gives you the possibility to search for up to five words taking stock of cities, regions and languages where the search is reported to come from most actively. Besides that you can find the frequency of appearance of news related to the keyword requested ( and links to those news are marked with letters on the keyword graph).

So today testing the service I also entertained myself. For example have got to know that for “love” as well as for “hatred” most of all search people of Philippines while for term “good” and “evil” people from Singapore and Mexico search more frequently accordingly.

The idea of this article and this small research attended me on recollecting one site( let’s call it experimentalsite.com). What interesting was about the site is that its home page had different Google Page Rank when opened as experimentalsite.com and experimentalsite.com/default.asp.

Of course I knew that Search Engine Spiders see those pages as different ones but this time my Tool Bar gave me very persuasive visual confirmation of that fact. The page experimentalsite.com had PR5 and page the experimentalsite.com/default.asp PR3. So the other time you’ll be achieving links form your link partner make sure that you’re linked to the right page.

VS

So I decided to check if Search Engines find the pages as different and what is a link popularity of each of those “multiple” pages. I only put the different variations of the page URL to Link Checking Tool and got the following:

What do we see from here? Google makes no difference whether you put www before your domain name or not. It treats both pages equally. The same tends to do MSN. But Yahoo give much less weight tot pages without antecedent www. In its turn Msn and Google appear not to rate /default.asp pages and you can hardly count links assigned to those pages.

However there is nothing to worry about as a situation with Page Rank Leakage is controllable on your end( read on the end of your webmaster).

Theoretically if Search Engine considers the same page of your site accessed in different ways to be different pages with duplicate content the site might trigger duplicate content penalties. I wonder if anybody has ever been penalized for that by search engine. Any ideas?

It’s common tendency for Search Engine Optimization specialists to avoid use of dynamic URLs and not groundlessness. Search Engine Spiders don’t index URLs overwhelmed with dynamic parameters.

So if your site is PHP-based and resides on an Apache Server then you might consider carrying out these four simple steps to boost your traffic:

1. Identify the file that needs to be changed and the variables that generate a common page. (commonly “index.php”).

2. Place a text file .htaccess in the directory where, “index.php,” is located on the server.

Specify variables you want to be static to the server: change “?category=1” variable to “directory-1.html”.

3. Create a rewrite engine in the .htaccess file. Put first line to read, “RewriteEngine On”. Specify Rewrite rule on the next line: “RewriteRule ^directory-([0-9]*).* index.php?category=$1 [L,NC],”.

4. In the PHP file replace “index.php?category=,” to read, “directory-,” where, “index.php?category=X,” is found and follow behind the variable (x) with, “.html”.

For all Overture/Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers must be interesting the fact that this Monday Yahoo launched its new advertising system (code named Panama). Recent numbers say that Yahoo has 27% share of the market while Google has 42%. No wonder, Yahoo has made one more step in attempt to catch up with Google as the value of an advertising market makes $1.4bn( in UK alone) and tends to double yearly.

What makes the new version of Yahoo advertising console different from the previous one? According to Yahoo chief executive Terry Semel, the new software system aims to let advertisers target potential customers more accurately based on the words that Yahoo users type into the search box. Yahoo also claims that its new advertising system enables advertisers to instantly calculate the cost of acquiring new customers.

The system went into beta release on Monday, and is supposed to get a full launch in autumn - so we look forward testing it (pretty please!).

Google continues to add new features to its system. Now it is Google Reader – a module that can be added to your personalized Google page. So now you don’t need to switch between your favorite blogs and news sources. From now you can reach the articles all in one place without adding a separate module for each one.

Google Reader is quite handy and useful. The posts are opened in the bubbles so that you could view the entire articles skimming posts. The number of posts displayed is set default 5 but you can change that number as well as the way the articles are displayed.

In my opinion this new Google feature will be able to make my life much easier giving me access to all the blogs I read daily simultaneously.

The Microsoft Research campus, spread across five large buildings, has two new MSN Search related projects under development, “Wild Thing,” and “Nocturnal.”

The first is nicknamed “Wild Thing” enables short hand searching, TMP sources stated:

“Microsoft originally devised Wild Thing for mobile users, so they wouldn’t have to enter so many characters on a cell phone keypad, but the company decided to make it available for everyone after seeing how useful it was.

For example, if someone found it difficult to spell the last name of California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, entering “ar* sc*w” into the query box or cell phone will find him. An entry of “ar* sc*w mo*” will find films from the former Terminator, as you can see the +mo* = movies query :).

Secondly, “Nocturnal”, a “viral” social type of MSN search companion tagging project; the technology taps into a user’s bookmarks and previously visited pages to share them with friends in the MSN Messenger buddy list. Lidong Zhou explains:

Nocturnal has two components. The first is found in MSN Messenger Live beta, which has a shared information folder. Drop whatever you want to share in it and that information is shared with friends on your MSN buddies list. You can tell MSN Messenger not to share anything, share with only a few people, or with everyone. The second part is a toolbar for the Web browser that lets you rate pages and capture links in your shared folder, allowing them to be shared with other people.

Microsoft to buy Yahoo!? Could it be possible? This single transaction could change the face of search marketing forever. Wiping out the old Overture/Yahoo! Guard, and making way for Microsoft AdCenter to reign supreme - which was released today! Coincidence? we think not…
As reported by CNN,

Top level executives are in talks with Yahoo! about potentially acquiring a major portion of the company, according to a report published Wednesday.

We don’t want to think that Yahoo! has screwed up so much in their new Panama re-design efforts, that they should announce the possible “selling out” to Microsoft. Albeit, the exact same day Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced MSN AdCenter, the company’s version of Google’s AdSense, is moving out of its beta stage to be officially launched and re-branded as Microsoft adCenter.

Microsoft previously was Yahoo’s number one listings syndicate, and now that Microsoft has “cut the chord” from the Yahoo! paid listings index, we’re sure advertisers will scramble to gain placement on the new AdCenter.

From our estimates, this should decrease Yahoo’s search volume by approximately a third - 1/3 (excluding content partnerships and clicks). So get ready folks, it’s going to be a bumpy CPC shake-out period.