For the first time on a routine week, Facebook has outpaced Google to become the most visited site on the internet.

According to research from Hitwise, Google’s share is still growing, but at only a fraction of the pace of Facebook.

The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.

Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.

So what does this mean for marketers? Well, it’s a slap across the face — any marketer that is advertising on Google should put their efforts into finding a good Facebook strategy stat.

[Via Hitwise]

The partnership between Yahoo! And Microsoft hit another big milestone as the companies give some hint of when major changes to advertising will actually happen.

Details are few, but one thing is certain, Yahoo’s advertising center will migrate over to the Microsoft Ad Center when the process is finally complete.

Currently, according to a news release and the companies new search alliance web site, the deal is set to go through before the 2010 holiday season. The timing sure to annoy just about every advertiser currently using Yahoo, so the duo left the window open for early 2011 after the holiday search season.

Once the deal actually goes through, Microsoft says advertisers using their Ad Center will reach up to 577 million searchers; which converts to better ROI and making it easier to segment campaigns among a large group of many niches.

While Microsoft is taking control of the advertising side of the partnership, Yahoo! continues to push its content and human support system.

Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

Everyone remembers the great Google snafu that saw search results change dramatically right before the holiday season, so my bet is on this partnership actually taking off in early 2011 — despite the fact that Microsoft surely wants to demonstrate Bing in a complete form for the holidays.

Microsoft and Yahoo! promise to give a three-month warning before the actual change and provide more details about making the switch to Ad Center or how advertising will change for either company. Until then, the partners’ Search Alliance Web site has some good details mixed with the self promotion

[Via Search Alliance]

The Search Engine Strategies conference is one of the greatest conferences to hit up for the SEO worker. Experts and novices alike can get some good information out of the show.

The conference features a lots of great speakers from big New York powerhouses such as the New York Times company SEO staff, the ABC News SEO staff, the author of World Wide Rave and of course a Googler.

The main page of the SES site said it perfectly:

Your customers, colleagues and competition will be in attendance — will you?

It’s always something to ponder, going to these type of events. Sometime you’ll come home thinking you didn’t learn anything. But even if you didn’t learn anything new, a whole slew of other people did. So if you learn one thing, it’s exactly what your competition knows.

I don’t think I’ve been to a conference where I didn’t take at least a small helpful nugget of advice. It’s always good to see what the big dogs are doing — even if they are far behind the smaller agile SEO experts.

See you at SES New York!

EQUTE — While press releases have been key to getting into the media, but it was murky how they affected search traffic once they made it online.

PR powerhouse PRWeb said before that it pushed search traffic by a large margin.

“Search engine rankings are arguably the most important small business marketing tool available today because it drives Web traffic — and potential prospects — to a small business’ Web site,” a PRWeb spokesperson once told WebProNews. “However, because improving search rankings is desirable, achieving results can be both challenging and highly competitive.”

A study showed that sites got 50 percent increase in traffic, and up to a 400 percent boost. The company involved in the study also said that the traffic spike lasted for days. When linked to social media, a press release creates a slew of links back to a site. Even though the site may not rank as well, those press releases will rank because of their authority and get great placement in news aggregators and news searches.

Every press release has a chance to grow beyond the initial campaign. If a noteworthy site makes it into a story or a top blogger grabs onto it can spread like wildfire.

So there it is, the cat’s out of the bag. One of the oldest sources for press and public exposure still works on the Internet.

EQUTE — As Google continues tweak its use of canonical tags to work across domains, Bing is saying that the tags aren’t all that necessary for their search results.

Bing Search Engine Land told webmasters should essentially use canonical as a last resort.

“Our first and foremost advice is the same as it always has been: 301 redirects and good site design should be the primary focus of webmasters, with canonical tags picking up the slack when technical limitations impede other solutions.

So this means, of course, that both 301 directs and canonical tags are necessary to stay competitive with duplicate content across all the search engines.

Bing said it would have full support of the canonical tag within several months, but in what exact form is still unclear.

EQUTE — Google and Facebook have jumped into the URL shortener ring in a move that could crush other services like Bit.ly and Ow.ly.

The move could finally be an answer to all those Twitter links that you don’t want to go anywhere near. Seeing these shortened URLs will give readers an additional layer of security by knowing that their clicks aren’t going to some phishery or virus-laden site.

Google’s goo.gl has a very, very short page describing their new service.

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

Stability — ensuring that the service has very good uptime

Security — protecting users from malware and phishing pages

Speed — fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

The Google toolbar now features a new share button that shortens the URLs, and Blogger now allows users to syndicate their feeds to Twitter using the shortened URLs.

Facebook’s shortener seems more designed to bring outside users to Facebook, or the new FB.me. It also features a neat trick to direct readers to the site with an easy to understand link. Say the Facebook name for your blog’s fan site is StarTrekPlanet, it can be truncated to FB.me/startrekplanet, making it easy for people to see where they are going.

These URL services also leave the window open for things similar to Digg’s approach where each site found through the shortener features a toolbar header. If Google and Facebook did the same it could mean greater reach for their sharing services.

This is a great stride in the field, it will certainly be interesting to see how third-party services weather the storm.

EQUTE — There are thousands of good URL tips for search engine optimization out there, but one simple fix is crucial for helping boos the homepage traffic.

One of the most basic things you can do is get your homepage consolidated. If you’re trying to get the best out of SEO, it an obvious foul to split up the page you are trying to link to.

A list of three common URL problems featured on SEO.com gives site owners a great set of tips to get things streamlined for search spiders and users.

Many sites send links to their homepage, but which one? Links don’t always come to the page you want.

SEO.com gave several examples:

http://www.mysite.com

http://mysite.com

http://www.mysite.com/index.html

http://mysite.com/index.html

This is a pretty easy fix, one that makes use of the almighty canonical tag.

Simply direct all those errant homepages to your www.mysite.com instead of cutting your resources into fractions. Even if you want to split your homepage up for separate versions or tracking purposes, you should send all other sites to whichever version you want showing up in the search engines.

EQUTE — Google has finally started cracking down on the multitude of “Google Cash” business opportunity offers

They are, of course, suing for trademark infringement since many of these affiliate marketers were prominently using Google’s name and logo all over their sites and landing pages.

This action seeks to stop a widespread Internet advertising scam that is defrauding the public by misusing the famous Google brand. The scam victimizes unsuspecting consumers by prominently displaying the famous GOOGLE mark, by suggesting sponsorship by the plaintiff, Google Inc. (“Google”), and by urging consumers to obtain a kit supposedly showing them how to make money working from home with Google.

The kit is advertised as free, except for a nominal shipping and handling charge or access fee. However, people who sign up for these offers have their credit cards charged with substantial recurring monthly fees. They also receive little of value, or nothing at all, in return for their payments.

Google filed a lawsuit against Pacific WebWorks and a slew of unnamed affiliates and other people. The offers came under many trademark infringing names:

The offers were provided to affiliate marketers, who got readers looking for a get-rich quick scheme to pay a dollar or two for shipping for an information packet. These sites featured a lot of fake user stories and big checks with Google in the corner. They promised fat checks, fancy houses and the lot. Google Cash orders, however, signed them up for a rebilling offer of $80 a month. And as the suit says, buyers “also receive little of value, or nothing at all, in return for their payments.”

So once buyers saw their bank account, it appeared Google had just ripped them off — a textbook case for dilution on top of the trademark infringement.

The Pacific WebWorks also got hit with a federal cyberpiracy charge — which can come with up to $100,000 per site fine for each site that registers, traffics in or uses a domain name that infringes on Google’s trademark. (Cornell Law Collection)

Going through all the law of the case is a promethean task, but this single fact gives an idea of the scope of the suit.

If the lawsuit extends to every affiliate site, landing page, affiliate network site etc., Google stands to make a lot of money — or at least the legal team does. But the suit also makes an example out of trademark infringers, and since Google is doing it, it may set major legal precedent for trademark law on the Internet.

Pacific WebWorks is going to be hurting if it exists very long, Google’s suit basically knocked their stock to zero. But that was no surprise — what will be interesting to see is how much each affiliate is hit with. The suit could rework how affiliates are affected by the law.

EQUTE — Anyone running an SEO campaign knows that the first step is getting indexed in the search engines. But after that the tactics are overwhelming and even seasoned site owners might forget about Google’s mobile search.

WebProNews has a good write up about how to get indexed in Google Mobile Search, but there are a few key steps that will be enough for most people.

1. Create a Google sitemap — just like creating a normal sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools
2. Allow any user to User-agent to access your mobile site i.e. Googlebot-mobile.
   

   “You should also be aware that Google may change its User-agent information at any time without notice, so it is not recommended that you check if the User-agent exactly matches ‘Googlebot-Mobile’ (which is the string used at present),” says Jun Mukai, a software engineer on Google’s mobile search team. “Instead, check whether the User-agent header contains the string ‘Googlebot-Mobile’. You can also use DNS Lookups to verify Googlebot.”

3. Make sure your site contains mobile-friendly URLs’ DTD (Doc Type Definition) declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML.

With the explosion of Internet-enabled phones (and more coming soon after the holidays) it’s high time to really make sure your mobile site is up to snuff — even if it’s not bringing you a lot of traffic.

EQUTE — The Bing Webmaster Center Team gave some pointers on link building for the Bing search engine.

Rick DeJarnette, of the Bing Webmaster Center, said in a blog post . He runs down the basics of link building and says the key to good search rankings is about the same as Google’s.

DeJarnette ran the gamut saying content is king, leverage authority sites, good inbound links — nothing new. He did go into what makes Bing take a second glance. While he says link building is OK (read necessary) he said they must be helpful to searchers.

Bing’s position on link building is straightforward - we are less concerned about the link building techniques used than we are about the intentions behind the effort. That said, techniques used are often quite revealing of intent. Allow me to explain.
Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

Using hidden links in your pages

Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known “bad neighborhoods” on the Web

Linking out to known web spam sites

When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction. If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.

Bing offered a lot of tips that will help, but it’s nothing a seasoned SEO expert wouldn’t know by working with Google. These tips do, however, give good basics for working with Bing.