New comScore Keyword Search Market Share Numbers.

Google dips ever so slightly the first decline in GOOG's short history.

Are MSN and Yahoo ready for battle or will the new Google MySpace partnership create a web popularity monster?

Will a predator partnership pay off?

The most recent recent search engine market share figures are out, and Google's nearly historic rise in search market share gains has apparently ended.

Here are the latest figures from All keyword searches within the United States:

July 2006 comScore Report

#1) Google
Searches Per Day: 91.8 Million
Market Share: 43.7%

#2) Yahoo
Searches Per Day: 60.5 Million
Market Share: 28.8%

#3) MSN
Searches Per Day: 26.9 Million
Market Share: 12.8%

#4) AOL
Searches Per Day: 12.4 Million
Market Share: 5.9%

#5) Ask
Searches Per Day: 11.3
Market Share: 5.4%

All Other Search Engines:
Searches Per Day: 7.1
Market Share: 3.4%

The comScore Search figures do not include Yellow Page searches or Map searches.

Other leading web analytics sources such as: WebSideStory, Hitbox, and more report keyword search market shares as this:

Google 60.2%
Yahoo 21.3%
MSN Search 11.8%
AOL 3.8%

Other Keyword Search Facts.

Big (4) Search Engines Total Percentage of Search: 97.1%

Percentage of Unique Site Visitors Delivered to a website for the first time from one of the Big (4) Search Engines: 87%.

Percentage of Organic/Natural Search Results on the Big (4) Search Engines Determined by Spiders/Robots: 100%.

Looking to Maximize Website Awareness with In-Market Internet Users?

Optimize your site for each of the algorithms powering the spiders of the Big (4) Search Engines.

According to comScore Yahoo is gaining market share throughout 2006 rising from low 24% to 28%.

Is Google losing market share to Yahoo? not really, both Yahoo and Google are gaining share at MSN and AOL's expense.

AOL lost more than a full percentage point as account cancellations continued to pour in at AOL (*other than wall street who can trust any numbers provided AOL-Time Warner, a failed merger that still stands as the largest failed corporate merger in business history*) and MSN also dropped nearly a full percentage point, while Ask also lost some of its already small search market share.

Let's also consider the newcomer to search: MySpace.
MySpace keeps fulfilling so many expanding visions on so many fronts, now even driving huge volumes of keyword search traffic to other search engines, that power the grouped MySpace results. MySpace generates nearly 100 million searches a month. Sources now claim that MySpace keyword searches total 5% of all Internet searches and that nearly 8% of all search results delivered by Google originate from users who originally began their keyword query on MySpace. The MySpace search numbers could help expalin Google's mysterious last minute motivations to invest heavily in MySpace just last month. Google's $900 million dollar upfront investment with MySpace might have been an effort to keep the sultry MySpace search traffic from being gobbled up by the suddenly search hungry; Micorsoft and also snatch MySpace searchers away from Yahoo (the shunned MySpace search partnership favorite) who was/is powering most of the MySpace search results to date.

Can these latest comScore search figures be trusted? maybe.

Keep in mind, comScore's many correction notices involving search figures already in 2006, it most likely would serve you best to consider these search numbers as a fairly accurate gauge in the incredibly popular and still emerging keyword search landscape. Also any Google search market share losses being reported could simply be headline fodder for comScore. Most server log files are still reporting Google as their leading website referrer by nearly a two thirds majority.

Have You Analyzed Your Server Log Files Lately?

Tech Rumors Flying Eric Schmidt to Join Apple Board

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is rumored to be near a seat on the board of Apple Computer.

Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs has been recruiting Schmidt in an effort to extend Apple's relationships and synergies with Tech titans.

Other technology chiefs on Apple's board include the likes of: Intuit, Genentech, and Forbes Media (Global Warming Expert and Internet Creator) Al Gore also sits on Apple's board they must sit him next to major shareholder Forrest Gump at board meetings.

Eric Schmidt Google's hand-picked leader since 2001 holds a computer science Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and used to work at Sun Microsystems and Xerox.

More rumors have Google and Apple joining in a new IPOD hybrid music/video product offering although GOOG continues to downplay interest in any music ventures.

If the Appple board seat plays out for Schmidt it could send mixed messages to Round Rock Texas, as the new Dell/Google computer product line and revenue share deals have yet to roll out in the marketplace.

Outsourcing Organic Search Engine Optimization? Make Sure Your SEO Vendor Keeps All Project Work Inside.

Is Your SEO Vendor Outsourcing Your Search Engine Optimization Project?

As the number of companies offering search engine optimization services continues to grow, the quality of Organic/Natural SEO services being provided is rapidly declining.

One recent development in the SEO field that compromises the integrity of our industry is the outsourcing of the organic/natural seo portion of the SEM contract to the lowest bidder, usually an inexperienced overseas firm.

Many advertising agencies and large marketing firms have recently created a "Full-Service SEO/SEM Division" and quickly discovered that unlike SEM that involves simple management of keyword bids and delivery of high margin invoices for working with SEM Admin Tools, Organic SEO is time and labor intensive.

Organic/Natural SEO is quite labor-intensive and requires specialized skill sets.

Clients with larger websites (and in the most need of experienced and skilled organic seo specialists) actually present the lowest margins to many "Full Service SEM/SEO shops", if the Organic SEO portion is too complicated in scope the man-hours involved chew up any profit margin.

Shifting expensive man-hours and reducing labor costs off-shore, increase project profits. That is why outsourcing Organic/Natural SEO is becoming more popular than ever, especially with marketing firms now offering Low Grade Search Engine Optimization Services for one singular purpose: TO RUN OUT THE NEAREST DOOR WITH MORE CLIENT CASH!!!.

New overseas firms are springing up to help many SEM/SEO marketing agencies by assuming the: costly manual labor that SEO services require.

Check out this blind partnership request we received from an overseas vendor with $3.00 an labor at the ready. Here's the message we received complete with mysterious language parameters.

Many times the software programs used to create text by these off shore firms acutally populates website content in similar fashion, some sort of new hybrid language that confuses spiders and users and only works to reduce keyword rankings.

Here's today's email message:

We offer services of top-level professionals only. Delhi and Pune are well-known for being a center of programming and software outsourcing services. There are dozens of technological universities in Delhi, educating thousands of software and website deve

We have very good setup for offshore development in Delhi [India] with very less overheads that's why we are able to provide the cheapest rates. We have everything for development center like 24 hours electricity backup,good internet connection with backu

We are already working with two USA based company as an SEO offshore development center. As per our understanding we make a SEO team with four person [one SEO + two Link builder + one content writer]. One Project manager is needed on above 3 SEO teams.

--

??? what ???

We receive these types of blind SEO outsource offers daily.

As the text of message above states many SEO firms are in over their heads and are outsourcing SEO project work to try and minimize man-hours and retain margin on projects.

Do all that you can to ensure that your full-service SEM/SEO provider is not shipping the SEO portion of your contract overseas to these type of firms offering inexperienced, cheap, foreign labor.

-

We would like to issue this reminder regarding Peak Positions, LLC.

As a market leader in Organic/Natural SEO, demand for Peak Positions SEO services and our time has never been greater.

Peak Positions keeps all of our SEO projects 100% in-house, to ensure quality and we also provide only OUR exclusive, proven SEO capabilities as agreed to with each and every client.

Outsourcing Organic/Natural SEO is a losing proposition for all websites involved.

Dynamic Site Struggling to Attain Top Organic Search Positions?

Google Says: Do Not use &id= in your URLs.

Matt Cutts at Google posted this "SEO Design Nugget" recently and site deisgners everywhere are hoppin' mad:

Here is what Matt Cutts from Google published:

> Minimize the number of redirects and URL parameters.

> Limit URL Parameters to 1-2 whenever possible.

> Don’t use “&id=” in the URL for anything other than a session ID.

> Since &id= typically represents a session ID, we at Google treat it as such and usually don’t include these URLs in the index.

Can it be made any more clear?

&id= in URLs is "lazy-man page coding" that Googlebot would rather ignore.


Related Comments from the Peak Positions SEO Lab:

> Don't Shoot the Messenger: finally a senior engineer at Google confirms the truth and the web design community "guns him down". Why not get to work accomodating Googlebot spiders instead of fighting them.

The session ID tag does not need to be part of the URL.

Sessions can be tracked server side with the IP address.

Hand Code HTML whenever possible.

Pay attention to W3C HTML Validation.


Outsource database SEO services to a proven specialist that can hand-craft page code and parameters to make data mining and content acquistion easy for the search engine spiders that control the organic search results.

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AOL Caves and Releases Keyword Search Data and Client Information to the Government.

AOL released the keyword search terms that more than 650,000 of its subscribers entered over a three-month period and admitted Monday that what it originally intended as a gesture to researchers amounted to a privacy breach and a mistake.

Although AOL urged that substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers' real user names, the company acknowledges that the keyword search queries themselves may contain personally identifiable data.

For example, many users type their names to locate their phone, credit card or Social Security numbers. A few days later, these same users may search for dry cleaners or restaurants in their neighborhoods, revealing their locations, or possibly search by keyword phrase for prescription drug prices, revealing their personal medical conditions. AOL admits the data that they released links all of the search data by user together in one numeric user ID.

AOL apologized for the keyword search history disclosure last week.

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," said an AOL spokesman. "It was an innocent attempt to help the academic community with new keyword research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped."

The recent disclosure by AOL comes as the Time Warner Inc. unit tries to increase search advertising revenues, usage of AOL keyword search services and other free, ad-supported features to offset a decline in subscriptions, a drop likely to accelerate with its recent decision to give away free AOL.com e-mail accounts and software.

AOL also announced it will lay off 5,000 employees by October 2006 as the company continues to spiral out of control.

AOL ranks fourth in search, behind Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft's MSN according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Although AOL does recieve keyword search fill results and small keyword search ad subsidies from Google, which now owns 5 percent of AOL, is still trying to get users to search directly on AOL sites in hopes of distracting them with an ad-supported video or two.

Industry executives are now pleading with Google and other major search engines to release keyword search history and data per user.

AOL search released data and information on what keyword search phrases were used, when the search was conducted and which results page link was clicked by user.

AOL released 19 million keyword search queries from 660,000 AOL subscribers from March 1 to May 31, 2006. The keyword search data only included searches conducted in the United States by AOL monthly subscribers.

AOL, like other search engines, does make historical keyword search data by user available to law-enforcement authorities with subpoenas. AOL complied with a Justice Department request for keyword search queries to revive a law meant to shield children from online pornography and collected a fee upon release of the information.

Google, on the other hand, fought the subpoena, and a judge ultimately ruled that Google did not have to turn over specific keyword search requests.

*Will Google Sue AOL for this most recent profit driven error in judgement?.

A display in the lobby of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., continually scrolls some of the keyword searches being conducted through its site. The Google keyword search data can only be viewed only by people physically in Google's offices, and multiple keyword searches by the same user are not linked.

*Will AOL subscribers sue AOL for this error in judgement?