Bing/Yahoo and Google Caffeine, Sounds like a chocolaty coffee drink? - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 25

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Yes, thank you for joining us for another fun-filled edition of our SEO Podcast. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, the sales manager at eWebStyle. Paul, you sound a little under the weather there. Yeah, man, I don't know. I've started to develop allergies in my older age. Older, I like older, because you say old age, there's going to be a beat down. An old man, or at least he's going to try. Yeah, I'm feeling all right, though. I'm ready for some SEO-ing. Excellent. Well, we want to remind you to follow us on Twitter. You can find us on twitter.com slash eWebStyle. That doesn't have a dash, so it's just E-W-E-B-S-T-Y-L-E. And go ahead and click the follow and start following us. We give you announcements of interesting... Interesting. We'll do one today about a new client. We want you to have a look at the client before we get a hold of their website. And then come back afterwards and let us know what you think of the work that we've done on their website. So I think that's going to be a nice little interesting interaction. You guys can probably tell us, hey, you could have done better here and here. Great job here and here. We'd love to hear your feedback. Speaking of feedback, you can write to us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. And you really want to write to us after this podcast. This is our 25th podcast. This is like a quarter... Oh, that is our gold. If this were years and we were doing one a year, this would be a quarter century anniversary podcast. And hopefully I would have retired by now. Yes. After 25 years. I'm with you on that one. And we always like to have a theme. Oh, what's our theme? This is our nude podcast. Dude, I'm not getting naked. Yeah, we're not. Don't worry. Good. Just testing. We're not even going to imagine nude, but it still will

be our nude podcast. So let me paint this scenario. Have you ever been leaving your house? You're on a trip. Not nude. Okay. Just leaving your house. You're on a trip. I'm like, oh, I forgot my sunglasses or I forgot my phone or whatever and you turn around. Well, what if you're in an airplane and you remember you forgot something? How do you get them to turn around the plane? You, uh... Apparently, all you have to do is flash yourself and punch the chick next to you. Oh. And they'll turn the plane around. I got that tonight. I did that last week. Oh. So you're just sitting there and you're like, damn, my sunglasses. Zip. Whack. You're on your way back. Really? That was pretty good. Zip. Whack. You're on your way back. Wouldn't you also be on your way to jail? Well, yeah. There's the little detour to the jail that's on the way. That happened? So I did that? Yeah. Yesterday on Southwest Airlines, apparently a guy named Darius Shapile, something or whatever, he gets in on the plane. He exposes himself and the lady appropriately screams. And so he punches her. God, that's... It gets more bizarre because as the stewardess and everyone is trying to subdue him, he's not interested in protecting himself. He's continuing to strip. By the time he gets off the plane, he's totally naked. What? Do that. I don't really know. And they cover him, apparently, with one of these airplane blankets. Blankets. Which... What I'll never use again now. Yeah. That's a good one. Mmm, it smells like Chappelle. I'm not using that. The other thing that I thought was funny about the report is like, the victim is in jail recovering from injuries, getting slugged, right? Not in jail, I'm sorry. It's at the hospital recovering from injuries. The perpetrator is also recovering from injuries. I wonder when he got those. I don't know. Where did he? Maybe while he was being detained? Oh, yeah. For real. I ain't going to doubt the lady next

to him beat him up. She probably didn't want to touch him. Yeah. I was like, ah! So that's a little bizarre. So now you know how to get your sunglasses if you're on the plane and you remember that you forgot them. This is actually also going to be more of a news because there's a lot of interesting things going on. We're going to talk about the Microsoft Yahoo deal. We're going to talk about a little bit about Jeff Weiner leaving Yahoo and where he's off to and not too much details about that. It is just a big move so we wanted to make sure that we mention it in our up-to-date, up-to-the-minute podcast. And we also want to talk about caffeine. Now, I'm not talking about the stuff in my little cup here. The most widely abused drug in America. Yes. We're going to talk about the... Wait, wait. Hold on. No. Give me some of that. Ah, caffeine. That's kind of caffeine. Yeah. We're going to talk about caffeine, which is a new release from Google. It's not out yet. They have a sandbox, which is different than the Google sandbox we usually talk about. And we're going to talk about that. Okay. And if that's not enough, we've got more exciting information to talk about. So there's some interesting things that I've noticed, discrepancies, if you will, between a Google webmaster tool and kind of search results of what Google has indexed in a more traditional sense from their website. And we can describe that as well. So maybe other people out there have noticed these discrepancies. Maybe it's obvious and I'm just not getting it. So, by the way, I answered one of my questions, it was obvious and I wasn't getting it yesterday. That was regarding the podcast and giving it a new description. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that does happen here. We are world-class experts. We're just not perfect. And we're always striving every day. So, Paul, this Microsoft Yahoo deal, what do you know about that? What's... You have

a spin on it? You have a take on it? Let's... Do you want to give the new website? Do you want to give the new website first? The new website. Oh, the... Which new website? A new client. Oh, yeah. We didn't give the name. We didn't... Oh, we didn't give the name? Oh, yeah. Okay. That mean I need to give the name? Yeah. But to be honest, we have obviously a couple of new clients. I don't... Didn't know which... I forgot which one we agreed. Let's go with start smart because I think that one needs the most work. Yeah, you're right. You're right. That's StartSmartToday.org. And, again, we will be kind of putting that out there on Twitter so you can actually find that link. But, yeah, visit StartSmartToday.org. If you want to give us some comments now, great. That'd be kind of cool. Definitely give us some comments. I'm interested to know what people who are listening to this podcast would do if they were the SEO expert on that website. Aside from scream and fright and immediately vomit. Yeah, take a look at it. It's our newest client. We're going to do some SEO. It's going to change, so expect that. And then we'll bring it up again in a few months when they're on the first page of Google. Yeah. Or next week. Yeah, Microsoft Yahoo. I thought it was very interesting. I wonder if it will even go through, if it will have passed the, what's that board? The board of directors. Yeah. The people, the government agency that says yay or nay. Oh, about monopolies and stuff? Yeah, yeah. I wonder if that will pass. Of course, it should, because you've got Google, right? Okay. So, you know, monopoly, you know, the government is never interested in saying anything beyond, you know, as long as there's two, it's not a monopoly. I assume that Google will fight the deal to make, I mean, I just, that's a wild guess. I assume that they won't want to see it happen. I

feel like Yahoo has been kind of left out because everyone's listening to Bing just came out. And, you know, Yahoo's kind of been falling in the search engine rankings. You know, they just haven't, they're not as innovative. Yeah, certainly awareness, yeah. They're not as innovative as what new products coming out, things like that. So, I'm interested to see where it goes. You bring up a very good point because, you know, Yahoo is actually bigger than MSN, bigger than Bing in terms of search results. It's just because they have a really loyal, long-term following. You know, their front page is very user-friendly. It's a gateway page. I know there's a particular term for that kind of, it's a portal. It's a portal. People have gotten used to it. You know, I know some of the guys here at this office, they use it. They're more comfortable searching in it, and that's where they go to first until they want technical searches. And then they actually do go to Google because the technical searches just come up better on Google. So, yeah, Yahoo, in order to maintain that, you know, they're probably losing market share as a portal even because now you can make your own portal at Google. So, if you're making your own portal at Google and you're getting better search results, then, you know, Yahoo is going to be losing clients. Yeah, I did. I have my own iGoogle homepage. You know, it's kind of set up like Yahoo. It's got my little widgets everywhere and all my little news feeds coming in. So, here's what I think. Well, here's, let me say this. If you haven't actually heard of this deal, here's what I read. Can I summarize it? I think I've got to go summarize it. So, this has been a long time process in coming. It started off with Microsoft negotiating with Yahoo to try and get some deal. That falling through, not working out. Microsoft attempting a hostile takeover of Yahoo. That also didn't work out. The Yahoo shareholders weren't

happy that the hostile takeover from Microsoft of Yahoo didn't work out. Changed the management at Yahoo. The new management has now negotiated with Microsoft, and Microsoft gets the shaft. Oh, wow. So, you bring in a new guy to make it go through, and it doesn't go through. Well, it went through. What we've got, though, it's an interesting deal. A very good, great negotiations on the side of Yahoo. Yahoo, for searches that occur on its site, even though Microsoft's responsible for the searches, gets 88% of revenue. I did see that. So, they get 88% of revenue, and they drop their search engine cost to zero. So, they've given up, what is that number, 12% in order to not have the expense. To save a ton of money. And I read that Yahoo is going to be, and you can correct me on this, they're going to be running Microsoft search. Or, no, Microsoft's going to be running Yahoo search. Yep. So, I was trying to think, okay, what does that mean for the search results? Like, if I'm the end user, I've got a business I'm trying to get on, Yahoo or Bing, what is that going to affect me? Okay. So, currently, we tend to focus on one search engine. We will continue to focus on one search engine. So, should you. When you're doing pay-per-click, we reminded you not too long ago in a podcast, go back and check that out, that you should be using Yahoo's pay-per-click and Bing's pay-per-click. I imagine there's going to be some sort of merging between the Yahoo pay-per-click and the Bing pay-per-click, and I don't know at what level. It may be that, you know, you're redirected from Yahoo pay-per-click over to Bing pay-per-click, or you just stay with your Yahoo pay-per-click account, but now Microsoft is responsible for managing it and displaying the ads, and it merges in its own. I don't know exactly how that's going to work. So, in either case, you do want to be on those, and that makes that a lot

more valuable than it was before. So, now you're not having to manage a Yahoo account and a Bing account, which, by the way, you know, some of our Bing clients are getting zero or no impressions and clicks. Okay. Yahoo, they are. And Google, of course, impressions out the wazoo. The challenge with Google is it's just significantly more expensive. So, you can get a lot more bang for your buck if you spend your time on Yahoo and Bing. So, now your bang for your buck is going to come from just Yahoo slash Bing, because Bing, at least in the things that I've been personally looking at, we've got bunches of other customers that I don't glance at very often, but because what I've seen is that Yahoo does provide reasonable impressions and reasonable clicks and Bing doesn't provide much, I can't imagine the price is going to go up that much. What you are going to do is get a bigger audience from either a Yahoo, well, from a Yahoo slash Bing account, because now there are going to be one account somehow, some way. Do you think that their search results, here's a question that I had, and I looked, do you think that their search results will mirror each other? Remember when Bing came out, and you could go to live.com, and Bing were absolutely identical? Yeah. Yeah. So, the Yahoo results and the Bing results should end up being absolutely identical. The same. Oh, okay. That's what I was going to say. So, now there's two search engines. There's Bing who and Google. Bing who. I like that. Okay. And that's it. So, or is that Bing who? Yeah. That was pretty good. I think I got that note right, too. That was really good. You need some more of this caffeine. So, now there's two search engines in terms of their results. There's Google and then everybody else. Yep. I think it's going to be interesting. I'd like to see how that goes. I'd like to see how it performs. I did

a check and saw that right now, Yahoo, it says combined. I checked on Comscore. Combined, Yahoo and Bing have like 28, 29% of the search market. And I remember that maybe a year ago being like 30 to 32. The combined? Yeah. That's what I remember because I kind of looked at Google and then everybody else. And remember, 1% on that is a buttload of searches. Oh, yeah. Okay. You know, that's a lot of people who have shifted from Yahoo, yeah, you know, from Bing who to Google each percentage because it's just, it's an insane number of searches that are going on. So, there you go. So, that works. So, that's Microsoft, Yahoo. That's coming soon. I don't think it's happened yet. Yeah, no. They haven't taken it over yet. So, that's coming soon. It's going to, and they're saying it's, is it going to change anything in the search? Which one's going to change? Yahoo. Yahoo. The results for Yahoo will now be what Bing was showing. So, I'm never using Yahoo again because I didn't like live and Bing is okay. Bing is great if you need to buy a plane ticket or shopping for a hotel. Yeah, you did mention that. So, that's, so that may help Yahoo actually because a lot of what people use Yahoo for are day-to-day kind of very consumer-end stuff whereas Google is a lot more, I see it as a lot more technical. Yeah. And, but, but also actually accurate. So, we may, we may see Google. So, if you do like a plane search in Google, I don't even know what happens. What happens? Have you tried that? Like, you know, find a flight or whatever you type in on Bing? You know, I haven't. I haven't tried that. Well, that's, well. I should, I should go do that. We'll put that in our next podcast. I'm going to put that as a note for our next podcast so that we know what the difference is in the results of, you know, searching for flights between

Bing and or Bing who and Google. So, I guess that, that would be pretty big if you are a travel agent or you work in that, in the travel industry and flights and the cost of airline flights affects your company. So, if you're a travel agent, Bing might be the best thing for you. I doubt it. And go ahead and try if you, if you really want to. Speaking of travel, this is really, it's really bizarre how some of these flight costs work. I, you know, I just got back from Panama and we actually flew, we live in Houston, for those of you guys who don't know, we flew from San Antonio, which is about three and a half hours west of Houston, to Houston, to Panama. So, we drove to San Antonio and we saved about $400 per ticket. That's nuts. And we took the exact same flight, of course, from Houston to Panama that we would have if we had purchased the tickets directly from Houston to Panama. We just saved $400 by driving three hours and taking an extra leg. That's crazy. So, did Bing tell you that? No, it was my wife. I came home and was like, you're going to drive for three hours before we go to Panama. Okay, honey. Thanks. So, what's next? So, we want, we did want to mention Jeff Weiner leaving Yahoo. Apparently, people are bailing Yahoo right and left if you kind of. Yeah, and I saw over the past like year or so, they've had a lot, they've had a lot of execs leave. So, what's going on at Yahoo? Get it together. They're merging with Microsoft. Here you go. I'm out of here. I did see one article, not by Jeff Weiner, but by another Yahoo-er person, Yahoo-er, and he was saying that he was looking, he always wanted to work for a small company. His first job was with like an oil company, 40,000 people. Second job was 2,000 people, Yahoo, which grew to about 14,000 people. He said he was

with them that whole time and it just sounded like he, you know, always wanted to work with a small company and have significantly more impact. Although he was, it didn't really say what his particular position was, but he knew a lot of the big names there. So, I'm sure he was working close with all of them. So, you know, maybe it's just the time for some people, you know, Yahoo's been around and it's time for people to be leaving. Interesting, with Jeff Weiner leaving, they haven't, they didn't name an immediate replacement. The president is going to take on his duties, so the people are going to report to her directly. And they were kind of lamenting, he's like, you know, how is it that we didn't have anything in place for this? Like a top senior officer, like a top management guy. You've got to know what you're going to do when he leaves, because he could leave, yeah. And he did. And he did, yeah. Apparently, he's working with a couple of VC firms. He's going to work part-time between Excel and Greylock, which, you know, frankly sounds really cool to me. You know, if you've taken a company and you've gotten them to the size of Yahoo, it's a lot harder. You know, this is one of the challenges with Microsoft and why you end up with, you know, stocks that are called blue chip stocks that don't grow very much. They may grow 10, 15, 20% a year. But how do you take a company that's got, you know, $5 billion in revenue and double their sales? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's not... It doesn't happen. Yeah, that's, you know, that's difficult to do. Right. So, Weiner could, you know, invest or have stock options in some of these smaller firms that he's going to be helping out as he's working with these VC firms. And it's much easier for him to double and triple his money in those than it is in a company like Yahoo. So, you know, I think

as soon as we... I would love to do VC at some point. I think, yeah, I think that'd be awesome. And then, you know, why not leave and do something new and exciting? Because, you know, at Yahoo, you're getting your head beat in by Google every week. You know? I mean, that's a sinking ship. I mean, not that it's a sinking ship. Like, they're not going to beat Google unless they come out with something just phenomenal. Like, they're not going to... You mean like caffeine? You know, so why not try something new or get something exciting? Because, you know, Google's got a lock on the search market right now. Yeah. We'll see how this other deal goes. Yeah, so that's... Speaking of caffeine. That's exciting. So, yeah, speaking of caffeine, that's a good segue. I should have picked up on it quicker. Caffeine. Not just for breakfast anymore. It's also for your search engine. That's right. Serve daily with your search results. So, Matt Cutts made an announcement. Caffeine's coming out. And Matt Cutts is... Matt Cutts is a big engineer guy at... Googler. Googler. He's a Googler. Googler-ite. There you go. He said Googler. Like, I don't know. I thought a person who used Google was a Googler. So, yeah, you know. That makes more sense. So, what is a person who uses Google? They're just Googs? Googs. I like that one. Lowly Googs. So, yeah, he is a high-level engineer in charge of the major engineering projects at Microsoft. I mean, at Google. And they announced that they're making a change. Caffeine is the name of the super secret, double secret, spit, handshake, don't tell project. And so, he made this announcement. And, you know, a lot of people are interested in it. There's a sandbox related to it. And what that means is, and this is sandbox more in the sense of a place where you can go play with it. So, they've got a separate server. You can Google it and, you know, Google caffeine. Actually, Google the words caffeine Google.

Yeah. And you'll see, you'll find some articles and you'll find the actual link, which is the caffeine sandbox, if you will. And, again, sandbox is kind of in the sense of playing with this particular release. With that caffeine sandbox, you can see how the results are. Now, Matt Cutts said specifically that they were working primarily on how they index. So, if you're not aware, there are three key aspects to a search engine. There is, first and foremost, results. So, those are the things that we see. Those results come from a database. And the database is a collection of, you know, a succinct way of looking at all the web pages that they've indexed. So, you've got results, database, and indexing. Indexing is when you go out and you visit all the web pages and you compile them into information and throw them in a database. From that database, when people do searches, you get the results. So, there's three key aspects. Matt said that they primarily worked on how we index, which means of the three components, they were working on indexing. Now, of course, if you're indexing and the way you're indexing differently now is adjusting how the data ends up in your database, then you are also going to change your results. Your search results. So, this certainly could have effect. They said the goal with caffeine was to increase, and Paul, you were asking, we were talking about this, you were asking, you know, so what is it supposed to do? Well, it's supposed to increase the size, don't ask me, of indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. So, size, I would imagine, has to do with the size of the database, so how many pages can they index, indexing speed, of course, how quickly can they index when they need to index, accuracy. To me, accuracy is going to change the results. Yeah, I would think so. And then comprehensiveness, which is, do we cover enough pages, you know, have we indexed all the pages that are associated with our, you know,

with a particular web site, that we're actually indexing? Ooh, that was hard to get out. I need some more caffeine here. So, apparently, they're saying it's not going to change the search results. I would assume that it would have some effect on the search results. I did a little reading. They said, this one guy said, yeah, if you go back to page three and beyond, it's completely different results. And I was like, so? So, that doesn't affect our job. No. Three and beyond. Like, I couldn't tell you the last time I went to page three on my search results. I probably should, but no, I'm not. You're going to be on the first or second page for me to find you. The only time I go to page three is when we get a new client and I see that their position is page three. And they're on position, like 40 or something. And I just want to confirm it and, yeah, sure enough, they're back there. But beyond that, page one or two. Rarely two. Yeah, really. And I did see a lot of things where people were, there were some pretty cool tools out there where people would put Google. I saw this one guy put a page where he put Google and then directly below it in another pane in the same website. It was Google Caffeine. And you could actually go and test it out and see how it goes. I thought it was pretty cool. I felt like the consensus so far is that right now it is a little faster, but it's pretty, pretty similar. But it's only been about, what, a month? Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's it. That's exactly the same one, too. I was looking at Carter Cole. Pulling it up. Yeah, if you go to cartercole, and that's C-O-L-E dot com. I'm assuming he's got a link from his home page, but if he doesn't, just go slash Google versus Google dot HTML. And it's got a, well, it starts off with a horizontal

plane, but I think it's easier to switch it to vertical. And you can see the differences between the Caffeine version and Google, and the current version. So there are some differences. One of the things that I read was that it was more likely, one group had noticed that if they were updating their blog more frequently, then they were getting better search results. And I read that. To me, that's going to have a big effect on their search results. I don't want to say give a precedence to newer content, but I did see that they're indexing content faster. Like they're getting tweets and blog entries from like 10, 15 minutes ago. And I'm like, okay, that's cool, because if I'm looking for news or something, I want the latest and greatest information. But that also stands to change the search results. Well, that may be a snapback. You know, there's a lot of talk in the industry right now how Twitter and searching on Twitter is going to be the new way to search because it's the most relevant thing in the moment. So if you're searching Twitter, you're searching most relevant information in the moment. So maybe Google's, you know, hey, we've got to speed up our search engine so that we've got relevant information from today, from now. This will have interesting effects. If that's true, then, you know, a lot of what our job becomes and what SEO becomes is, you know what? And we know this anyway because continually adding information to your website is information and content is king, right? We've said that over and over again. So now not only is content is king, but also, you know, continuing to update your website with that fresh content. So, you know, you could argue that if we started on day one and I posted, you know, 5,000 pages of great content, that might not do better, you know, between from day one to, say, day, you know, year two than the website that I started with 20 pages and was adding,

I don't know, 20 pages a week or something. And Google over the long haul, even if it's the identically same pages over the long haul, Google's probably going to tag that and say, look, this is new relevant content, not just relevant, old relevant content. So we'll keep an eye on that and give you any feedback that we notice, that we see. As well, please send us any feedback that you have, any notice that you have that you'd like to, you know, make sure that we get out to the audience. Thank you guys again for listening. Thank you guys for sending emails. Again, our email is podcast at e-webstyle.com. And, wow, looks like we're over with our podcast. So next time we will talk about searching the flights on Google as compared to Bing, since Paul's already done that, and at least on Bing, or Bing. And then we'll talk about some of the challenges, some of the information discrepancies we've seen, at least I've seen, on the differences between Webmaster Tools and some Google search results. So until then, make sure you tune in then. That will be our 26th podcast. This is the end of our 25th podcast. Thank you guys for listening. Until next time, I'm Chris Burris. And this is Paul Hensley. Bye-bye for now.