A bar appears at the top, which says “Bing is more than just a pretty picture. See why.” You’re then presented with buttons for “Show me” and “No thanks”.

If you click the former, you’re walked through the following path:

SOPA Blackout Day will see sites like Wikipedia, reddit, Mozilla, and Failblog cease normal operations in order to spread the message that SOPA, PIPA and any similar laws can kill the free internet, and must be stopped.

Google is also planning on participating in the protest, although their demonstration is not quite as dramatic as a blackout.

Bloomberg is reporting that Google will place a link on their homepage in order to show their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Google has been an outspoken opponent of the legislation for months.

“Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Samantha Smith, a Google spokeswoman, told Bloomberg. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page.”

Of course, a link on the homepage is not as bold as shutting down your site for an entire day, but would we really want Google to do that? There is plenty of debate right now surrounding Wikipedia and reddit’s imminent blackouts. While some side with Jimmy Wales in thinking that the drastic action is necessary as a warning message of what could happen when you screw with the internet, others feel that it will be ineffective and even counterproductive.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo called the idea “silly,” saying that “closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

So Google won’t go dark, but they will add something to their usually-spartan homepage. It might be for the best. Can you imagine the freakout if people jumped online tomorrow morning and saw this:

“In addition to the visible design changes like new colors and spacing, we’ve made some changes to functionality to showcase the content that really matters to you: we’ve hidden buttons and navigation links until they’re actually needed,” says product manager Conrad Lo. “Now you can collapse the left panel to give yourself room for more gadgets, or pop it back out when you want to chat with a friend.”

So far, the iGoogle gadget directory is lacking any Google+ gadgets, and with more and more people using Chrome and its default tab page as a homepage, it doesn’t seem like iGoogle is playing to Google’s main points of focus these days, but that’s probably why it’s just now getting the redesign.

The fact that it did get a redesign at a time when Google is cleaning house and eliminating a number of its products, is probably a good sign for iGoogle users that it isn’t going away any time soon.

In fact, Google hints that more updates to iGoogle are on the way. With the Google+ APIs in testing, I would imagine that we will see a lot of Google+ related stuff coming soon.

It does provide a way for Google to control more of the web experience for non-Chrome users though. And it still does add a little something extra for Chrome users. The search box includes the recently launched voice search feature.

Original Article: Yahoo has a new advertising campaign going, which takes aim at Google. Will it help the company’s market share? Bing has been taking a similar approach since its launch. While its share has done pretty well considering how new the "decision engine" still is, it’s barely put a dent in Google’s.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo is dropping $75 million to $85 million on the new campaign. A representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews,  "the $75-$85M spend range is a subset of the $100M Yahoo! announced last year."  The campaign is kind of an extension of that "It’s Y!ou" campaign they launched last fall. "You" are still the focus. Take a look at Yahoo’s new ad:

Whereas Bing kind of attacked Google’s results with its commercials, Yahoo is going after Google’s homepage. Is this a good strategy? For one, Google offers a personalized homepage in iGoogle, for those who don’t want the simplicity. I also wonder how big of a role the homepage plays into the search habits of users at this point. There’s no doubt that it plays some role, but how many searches are increasingly coming from search keys on phones? How many from the search box on the browser? Or from various other apps and sites?

Clearly, Yahoo is not just plugging search here. It’s plugging its homepage in its entirety and all of the content and apps that go with it. How important is a homepage these days? I know I have pretty much all of the access points I need for a regular day’s worth of web browsing and working available right from my browser (via bookmarks/add-ons).

That’s not to say that Yahoo’s homepage can’t be useful. I’m sure many do use it frequently, but is the homepage really the way to win market share at this point? Particularly with mobile becoming such an important factor not just in search, but in how people access the web?

Now iPads and iPad-like tablets appear to be the next big thing. How important is a web homepage with these devices? Yahoo’s ad seems to come at a time when web access is trending away from the homepage.

I’m not saying the homepage is dead. You’ve got to start somewhere. But consolidating "everything you need" into one place seems to be happening more and more from a different level than the web itself – from the operating system, and the web browser.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz recently said, "Google Is Going To Have A Problem". Meanwhile, Google Chrome OS devices that will go right to the (Google-powered) browser upon startup are on the way. Android is already doing pretty well, and it’s getting ready to go to TVs. Google is now plugging the latest  version of its Chrome browser, which is apparently super-fast, as Chrome’s share of the browser market continues to grow. The world (or at least the fraction of the world that cares about the search industry) is still waiting for the integration of Bing and Yahoo.

Note: There is some conversation going on about this topic over on our Facebook page.

What do you think of the latest Yahoo ad? Will it be successful for the company? How significant is the homepage to your web browsing habits? Share your thoughts.

"Homepages present big opportunities for online advertising. For example, display advertising on Facebook consists mainly of small sponsored ads that blend with the rest of the content on profile and other pages within the site," says Jessica Ong on the Compete Blog. "It will be interesting to see if Facebook further monetizes its homepage."

Compete has now looked at AOL’s homepage as it pertains to ad inventory. Specifically, they looked at an ad for Tracfone. "This type of homepage ad is a go-to tactic for media buyers looking to drive lots of traffic, and hopefully sales, to their advertising clients," says Compete’s Alex Patriquin.

"However, it can often be difficult to tell just how effectively homepage ads perform. Clickthrough, the most common measure of ad effectiveness, doesn’t represent the full value of display advertising since many people who see the ad don’t click on it, but do visit the advertiser’s site afterwards," adds Patriquin. "There’s also the question of whether those people who visit an advertiser’s site would have gone anyway, regardless of whether or not they saw the ad."

It turned out that according to Compete’s analysis, visitors from the AOL homepage were 3.77 times more likely to visit Tracfone the same day. They were 6.28 more likely to visit in the same session.

Here’s what the referring sites looked like for Tracfone:

That’s a powerful homepage. Compete’s data was collected using a new "advertising effectiveness solution" it has developed for homepage ads on portals and other top publishers.

"Hompages present big opportunities for online advertising. For example, display advertising on Facebook consists mainly of small sponsored ads that blend with the rest of the content on profile and other pages within the site," says Jessica Ong on the Compete Blog. "It will be interesting to see if Facebook further monetizes its homepage." Here’s another interesting graph:

Other findings from Compete include:

-  Ads on the homepages of both MSN and AOL reached 13% of homepage visitors, fewer than an ad on the Yahoo! homepage, which reached 16% of homepage visitors (based on analysis of March visitors).

- In March, 22 million more people visited Google’s homepage than Yahoo!’s, despite Yahoo’s interactive homepage and fresh content

- Facebook rivaled Google in terms of homepage-to-domain visitors, attracting roughly 64% of site visitors to its homepage

- MySpace saw the greatest jump in its ranking of homepage visitors, going from #11 in domain visitor ranking to #5 in homepage visitor ranking, with 72% of site visitors seeing the homepage

- Homepage visitor traffic varies greatly at the top publishers – from 3% to over 70% of domain visitors – and this type of data is critical to executing effective media buying.

Homepages that offer advertising are worth big money to advertisers. Compete’s data is an interesting look into where the visitors are actually going. 

Google’s simplicity was a game-changing factor; superior algorithms may also have been at work, but due to both influences, it became noticeably easier to find good results.  Other companies scrambled to catch up (or pare down, as it were), but Google’s lead continued to climb.

Now Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask appear to be more or less screwed in the search market, and they may be redeploying some of those old, “make-it-pretty” ideas.  Pictures, videos, different font sizes – you may see any or all of these while looking for various people or things.  Google’s (sort of) taking part in this movement, as well – OneBox results are emphasized, and the search giant has tested new homepages in Asia.

Gord Hotchkiss, the CEO of Enquiro, pointed out to BusinessWeek, “The real problem for Google is not degrading the user experience as they’ve defined it.  And yet, given the competitive landscape, they can’t afford to sit on innovation either.”

Expect to see ongoing adjustments at Google.com, then.  But look for any really radical stuff to show up at its competitors’ sites – they have the least to lose and the most to gain.

Yahoo Takes Panama To Taiwan

Unless, of course, we ignore the “Panama” moniker, which is exactly what The China Post’s Dimitri Bruyas did.  I admire his style, and his quotes from Hung Hsiao-ling, the general manager of Yahoo Taiwan.

“Since 2005, sponsored searches in the United States and Korea have been steadily increasing,” said Hsiao-ling.  “In 2007, sponsored searches constituted 43 percent of all searches in the U.S., and 62 percent in Korea.”  Bruyas points out that paid searches are only at 36 percent in Taiwan, though, and the possibility of improvement was likely a motivating factor behind the introduction of Yahoo’s upgrade.

The last place in which we saw Panama take hold was Australia; prior to that, our own David Utter covered a round of improvements, and Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing wrote, “Panama is catching up to Google AdWords in features pretty quickly.”  Google, meanwhile, has been testing different homepages in various Asian markets.

Hat tip to Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker.

According to the IDG News Service’s Sumner Lemon, Sergey Brin announced, “We’re actually now experimenting with trying new kinds of homepages, for example in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, that are a completely different type than we’ve tried before on our U.S. site as well as our European sites.”

The mention of Korea comes as no surprise – WebProNews covered that change almost two months ago – but the other developments appear to be new.  Lemon outlined some of the alterations, writing, “The default version of the iGoogle: Taiwan Home site has a search bar at the top of the screen.  Below that, the screen is divided into five boxes with content, including four boxes that offer tabbed views: Google News, Google Trends, Personal Tools, and Frequently Used Tools.  The fifth box includes a row of animated icons for Google services, such as Picasa and Blogger.”

More of a visual person?  Ionut Alex Chitu has a screenshot of a Hong Kong version.  And below Chitu’s post, someone by the name of “Matt Cutts” dropped by to defend the less-than-streamlined approach.  “This home page (in my opinion) aligns more closely with what Asian users want and expect, so I don’t view this as eroding Google’s philosophy at all.  A page that might look clean to one country can look too sparse to another country, and it’s a good thing to look at what each country’s users want/expect.”

Fair enough.  And although Cutts notes that he is just stating his personal outlook, his comment means that Google.com is likely to remain unchanged.

The first was to http://blog.clientsite.com and the second was to http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/. They were concerted that their Technorati rank and linking efforts were being compromised. And, of course, they wanted a fix.

I did some digging around it and it turns out that it’s the way the domain mapping was setup in TypePad that was causing the issue. It can be fixed, but there are consequences.

In the client’s TypePad account there are actually two blogs, each with a unique URL.

1. http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/

2. http://blog.clientsite.com/my_weblog/

Out of the two blogs above, #1 is setup as the ‘home blog’ meaning that it can be accessed via the main URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/) and the unique URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/).

When the domain mapping was setup, the entire account was mapped to blog.clientsite.com, thus the home and unique blog URLs were included.

If just #1 was mapped to blog.clientsite.com, then no /blog/ folder would have show up.

However, fixing the domain mapping wasn’t going to be easy. The first option was to change domain mapping settings. This would result in all blog URLs changing and the old URLs becoming invalid. The only way to fix the duplicate URL issue, and not break any existing URLs, would be to move the blog to a different sub domain, like weblog.clientsite.com, then setup blog.clientsite.com as a valid hosting account and create 301 redirects for all old URLs to the new URLs. The downside here is that Google may temporarily penalize the new subdomain as it doesn’t have any history.

The issue with duplicate homepages is all in how TypePad’s domain mapping is set up. I really wish TypePad would just 301 redirect the home blog URL to the unique blog URL or vice versa. However, that’s not an option that I saw.

The client decided to just leave things as they are for now. They are planning on moving away from TypePad so any work now would just be short term. Later this year, we’ll probably move them to a local WordPress install and ensure that there is only one blog URL.

If you have TypePad, and are considering using domain mapping, ensure that you just map the specific blog to your site to avoid duplicate homepages. Granted, if you want to map multiple blogs or other TypePad features to one subdomain, than you can’t avoid the issue and will have to map the whole TypePad account.

Comments