Google in talks to buy Yelp – A perfect match
Google is in talks to purchase Yelp for "Half Billion Dollars Or More", Michael Arrington at TechCrunch reports.
- Google is the king of search but the local search market is still up for grabs
- Google has the adverting network that could increase revenues way beyond what Yelp is currently capatiable of
- Acquiring Yelp would give Google the push that it needs to get in the face of many more mobile users
- Yelp + Google Maps would quickly add the content that Google has been slow to acquire. This would give users even more reasons to user Google Maps
- Yelp has a passionate community of users who are linked with their brand. This would dovetail perfectly with Google's application platform and stop the competition from acquiring these users
With Google Chrome OS Your Web Applications Will Be The New Desktop Applications
The other day I had the privilege of writing code almost nonstop (with a couple small food breaks) for about 12 hours. During this long sprint I left Pandora open the entire day on one of my side monitors. I noticed something interesting after my 12 hours (I am a PandoraOne client) of continuously using Pandora... I provided just one single pageview to the site after spending half of a day on it.
Pandora of course has already seen this coming and is optimized for it. The ad impressions on their free version are displayed based on time on the site and not page view.
More products also act like this including Gmail and Google Reader. Even the product I am currently working on (BuzzStat.com) is feeling more and more like an desktop application and less like a web site as we develop it further.
This is becoming more common in this new land of the AJAX built web but I believe in the next 3 years we will see an explosion of web apps that feel more like desktop apps. Right now the web is already moving in that direction but we will soon see this accelerate if Google has it's way.
Why is this?
The launch of the Google Chrome OS may be the single largest push to make your desktop and the web become one. With that change there will be no more concept of "desktop applications". The web applications under development today will now be the new desktop applications of tomorrow.
What you need to do is be prepared when this change happens. The web application your developing today needs to start looking and feeling more like a desktop application. This is the way it will be treated and this is what users will soon come to expect.
This is the direction the web will soon go so it's better to be ahead of the curve.
Web Master Tools: Another important tool in your SEO tool box
The three largest search engines all provide you into a small look into their inner working. If you are serious about promoting your site you need to be signed to all three of these free services. Signing up for all three services is a must but Google by far gives you the most detailed information out of the three.
Some of the features in Google Webmaster Tools are the following
- Top search queries - Impressions shows what searches your site appears in. Clickthrough shows what searches provided clickthroughs to your site
- Links to your site - What sites are linking to your site
- Sitemaps - Submit your sitemaps and see how many pages Google has indexed
- Keywords - What are the most popular keywords on your site
- Crawl errors - Find out if there are any errors when the crawler receiving your site
- Crawl stats - Gets graphs of pages crawled per day, kilobytes downloaded per day and time spent downloading a page
- HTML suggestions - Look for duplicate tags, missing tags, etc
- Fetch as Googlebot - View your site the way the crawler sees it
- Malware details - Google search now provides built in malware detector. If Google determines there is malware on your site and this section gives you details into this.
Google Webmaster Tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Yahoo! Site Explorer
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Bing - Webmaster Center
Have you taken the blind search engine taste test?
Remember the blind taste test for a soft drink? Well this is a blind taste test for search engines...
With all the fan comparing the benefits of Google VS Yahoo VS Bing it makes you start to question who's side you are really on. That was a problem until the Blind Search came along.
I found this great little site the other day which lets you run a blind test on all three search engines at once. You then get to pick the one you like the best and the site revels what search engine you choose.
Are sitemaps still useful for SEO?
I was speaking with a client the other day who is very tech savvy and also runs a relativity large site. I was very surprised when I asked him how often he submits a new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and I received a response of "Why do you use sitemaps? Aren't they out dated?".
Ok so first and formost I have heard from may people say that sitemaps are no longer required because crawlers can now very quickly visit your entire site. These people will also argue that with proper site design and page structure the crawlers will be able to efficiently get to all the pages on your site without the sitemap.
This all may very well be true... crawlers today are much more robust than they were years ago and proper site structure will make crawling more efficient. It happens that Google, Yahoo, and Bing still give you the ability to submit your sitemap. My take is that even if you belive it will help a small amount or not at all isn't it worth the 5 minute investment? Think about it, if all things are equal and the guy next to use does not use these tools but you do... that may give you the small edge you need to succeed.
I would go so far as to argue that sitemaps are 100% useful for SEO purposes. Sitemaps allow you to tell search engine how often each of your pages gets updated, the last time the page is modified, and the relative priority of the page compared to the rest of the site. They will also guarantee your site to be crawled the most efficiently way possible.
Here are the best places to start to submit your sitemap:
Google Webmaster Tools
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Yahoo! Site Explorer
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Bing - Webmaster Center
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