The Search Engine Blog

Archive for January, 2009

knol = knowledge
The Google tool knol is made for publishing your tidbits of knowledge. Google is using knol to publish information and is even using the revisions feature to keep the article up to date. This is a good use of knol and we hope you’ve found a use for it as well.

Google Webmaster Tools verification – a knol by Webmaster Tools Help

I always love a free tool, but I’m looking this gift horse in the mouth. Google is offering a free sitemap generator that you install on your server. (You’ll need admin rights.) This tool automatically creates and updates sitemap files but also monitors server traffic. This information is reflected in the sitemap file. Now who wants to freely give even more data to Google? While the concept sounds great, a red flag goes up for me. While I don’t mind them being notified of new pages, knowing my traffic by accessing my server traffic is one step too far. While it may help me (or not), what is Google doing with that data? Where’s my piece of that financial pie?

The question is, can Google know how much traffic I’m receiving from their competitors, where my links are coming from and a whole bunch of other goodies. It smacks of the analytics code data they collect and then share…perhaps with your competitors. Am I being paranoid?

googlesitemapgenerator – Google Code

Yahoo! sent an email message to their Search Marketing advertisers to let them know about changes to their Terms And Conditions & Program Terms. Here are the archived terms and conditions. A comparison of the two yields nothing too shocking other than a reinforcement of the six month old change where Yahoo! can create or change your search ads for you. And you have to pay the bill when they do. There’s a discussion at Webmaster World about this topic.

And why does Yahoo! continue to lose market share? Mmmmm. Point weapon at foot and pull trigger.