Category Archives: SEO

New York Times Archives Now Free To Enjoy Traffic Generated By SEO

The New York Times announced that they will put an end to TimeSelect, their premium access, in order to grant free access to all visitors.

From now on, New York Times’ archives from the past 20 years, and the public domain years of 1851-1922 will be accessible to all. Some content from 1923-1986 will also be available for free.

This move was motivated in a large part by the surge of traffic that the NYT website is receiving from search engines, thanks to Search Engine Optimization efforts. According to Staci Kramer from PaidContent, who interviewed Vivian Schiller, SVP and GM of NYTimes.com, the site was applying SEO techniques since their acquisition of About.com in 2005:

“The SEO dates back to NYTCo’s acquisition of About.com. Since About.com’s SEO technology and expertise was applied, NYTimes.com has experienced triple-digit growth in unique visitors. From July 2005 to July 2006, internal logs showed an 87-percent increase in unique visitors compared with 21 percent the previous year over year.”

NYTimes.com realized that it will make sense for them to index even more content and enjoy the traffic coming from organic search, so they’ve decided to open up their million archive pages.

With TimeSelect, the NYT was making $10M a year. Since the site has about $13M unique visitors per month, it will generate much more revenue with an ad-based advertisiting than it could from online subscription sales.

I guess Google AdWords sells guys have immediately called the NYT to suggest AdSense 🙂

Casino.com Launches New Design

Anyone can rank for highly competitive keywords. For that, you just need to have an old domain name based on your most important keyword and let it gain links naturally throughout time.

Casino.com is one of these sites. It ranks well for extremely competitive keywords such as “Casino“. It’s very hard to compete in this kind of industry without going black-hat and get removed from Google’s index instantly.

I noticed that Casino.com has just been redesigned and is now simpler to use and to navigate. Feel free to go there to play real money or just to have fun with their free games.

Can Google Update Its Whole Index in 14 Minutes?

A french SEO guy claims that Google is able to update its index in 14 minutes. The guy based his comment on a test he made: he published an article on his blog, which was appearing a few minutes later on Google Blog Search, and then directly on Google’s default web results. The guy also backs his comment with what a Google Engineer from Googleplex had supposedly said to a friend of his.
It could have been true if Google hasn’t announced a few months ago the launch of Universal Search, a new feature that consists of displaying different kinds of content such as Images, News, Videos, etc directly into web results.

What the guy noticed was just Universal Search in action, Google has displayed the blog post directly in their web results, and not only in their Blog Search results.

So it was not an update of their entire database, but rather just the displaying of a blog post based on the user’s query.

Source: Seo By the Sea 

Google’s Market Share In France Close To 90%

A few years ago, Altavista was the leading search engine in France. Immediately after Google launched its search engine there, people left Altavista to try this new and simple search engine, and didn’t turn back. Altavista was indeed becoming full of spammy pages and people were just annoyed with that.

A study made by French agency Xiti shows that Google’s market share is now close to 90% in this country, followed by Yahoo, MSN, Free etc whose market share has been going down for the last few years.

I don’t know what we should say about these figures? Should we be scared or happy?

Peggy Anne Salz No Longer at MoConews, Now Dedicates Herself to MSearchGroove Only

In my last post I pointed out that Peggy Anne Salz, a long-time blogger at MoCoNews who wrote some of the better analysis on the site, had launched her own site covering mobile search and content discovery.

This week I see she’s no longer listed at MoCoNews, so it appears she has decided to dedicate herself full-time to Msearchgroove.com . If you want to read the news coverage and insight that made her a voice in the mobile content space, then I suggest you check it out.

MSearchGroove: New Site about Mobile Search and Mobile Content Discovery

MSEARCHGROOVE.com is the newest venture from Peggy Anne Salz, author of the industry’s first comprehensive (220+ pages) report on mobile search and content discovery. Living up to its strapline: “At the intersection of content and context”, Peggy’s site – formally launched in May – is fast becoming the industry’s premiere thinking space to discuss and debate mobile search, personalization, recommendation, targeted mobile advertising, and social networking.

The site also features primary research, analysis, interviews, and podcasts showcasing the companies and technologies just
coming out of stealth mode to have a profound impact on the industry.

Be sure to check out their great article about Google on Vodafone Live! Netherlands, the first Vodafone portal in Europe to unveil this search engine.

Yahoo! Needs More Mobile Sites: Now Accepting Mobile Feeds

In its attempt to increase the size of its mobile web index, Yahoo! just announced that it’s now possible to submit more information about your mobile sites.

With Yahoo! Webmaster Central, errr, I mean Yahoo! Site Explorer, webmasters will now be able to submit the url of their website and wait for their mobile robot to crawl the site, or they can submit an entire site feed in one of the following formats:

You can provide us a feed in the following supported formats. We do recognize files with a .gz extension as compressed files and will decompress them before parsing.

So far, it was possible to submit a sitemap of your mobile site only with Google Webmaster Central, good move from Yahoo!.