People soshalize. They don't care how it's spelled. They just do it.
Let’s call it what it really is, shall we? Despite efforts by Bing/Yahoo to stay relevant as well as efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the search game, there really is only one. For years, I’ve always had to add the caveat when discussing search marketing that “When I say Google, I mean Bing and Yahoo as well.”
Google has stuck with its story that the various components of Google+ and the +1 button don’t have an effect on search rankings. They have to. Once they admit that it does (as countless studies and tests have indicated), the flood of spam and blackhat SEO techniques will grow larger than it already has. This is important to understand for anyone doing research on the topic. Google isn’t trying to deceive people for the sake of being deceptive. They’re trying to protect the sanctity of what will become their greatest advantage in the ongoing search engine wars. They will not sit back and do what Yahoo did a decade ago, relying on mass adoption to carry them through. Just because Google is on top today doesn’t mean that they have no fears for the future.
In the early days of social media, social bookmarking was up there with social networking and social news as a primary way of sharing the world with others. Delicious was at the top of the bookmarking world, wildly popular amongst academics and geeks and poised to expand to the rest of the world.
Between mid-and late-January, Google‘s traffic levels according to Alexa.com passed Yahoo! to become the highest traffic website in the world for the first time, other than two brief spurts in 2006. It comes on the wake of several pieces of news centered around Yahoo!, including Microsoft’s unsolicited offer to buy them and planned layoffs.
Both sites have been hovering around each other in traffic since the beginning of 2006, bouncing regularly between 25% and 30% reach to internet users worldwide. Yahoo! is still listed on the Alexa rankings as #1, but if Google stays put, this will change with the next ranking update. [Read more...]
