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For webmasters, e-marketers and e-merchants...

As usual, the deals and relationships between major search engines have changed since the last newsletter. The most notable of these changes are:

- AOL's extension of their contract to use Google results
- MSN's dropping their contract to use Looksmart results

See the articles below for more details and some important predictions based on these changes.

Lastly, Christmas is coming soon, and in many online retail industries, the yuletide season is also the biggest season for online sales. Although it is a bit late to create sites specifically for this market, it is a good time to review your marketing strategy in order to target holiday shoppers.

Enjoy our Newsletter!

- Jason Campbell

Search Engine Navigator

The Future of Inktomi In December of 2002, Yahoo! bought Inktomi for $235 million. As things currently stand, Yahoo, MSN, and Google each receive about 30% of online search traffic. However, because Google's search results are used for Yahoo! searches, Google actually captures about 60% of the market. Since the sale of Inktomi, we search engine optimizers have been collectively holding our breath waiting for Yahoo! to dump Google and get in bed with Inktomi for Yahoo! search. That would decrease Google's stranglehold on search traffic and create more competition. Where does Inktomi get its traffic? Inktomi provides results for MSN search. Currently, when someone does a search on MSN, they get the following results: - MSN's own "featured sites" results (paid advertisers) (usually 1-5 results) - Overture's "sponsored sites" (pay-per-click advertisers) (usually 3 results) - LookSmart's "web directory sites" (anywhere from 0 to 50 results) - Inktomi's "web pages (leftovers) Inktomi is also the back-up for Overture results (after Overture's own sponsored links), and is used for a myriad of smaller web portals and search engines, such as About, BBC, Espotting, Goo, HotBot, and InfoSpace. The good news for Inktomi is that MSN will be dropping LookSmart in mid-January of 2004, and replacing its results with Inktomi's. Add that to the Yahoo! swap (Inktomi for Google), and Inktomi will go from having a very small share of search traffic to having almost 60% of the total. Inktomi's Quality Obviously, Inktomi is about to become very important, so I looked into Inktomi's search results, in the hope of figuring out how to optimize for this born-again search company. The results however, were not very encouraging. There was a lot of doubling (the same site showing up 2 or 3 times), and a lot of spam. Mind you, there is a lot of spam in Google too (Spam is any web page that attempts to deceive a search engine's relevancy algorithm, usually resulting in pages that are irrelevant to a user's search). The interesting thing was that the results differed a great deal from Google's. This is good for the consumer (different results means real competition), but bad for the search engine optimizer. Ideally, a well-optimized site should show up in all the search engines, but Google and Inktomi have different ideas about relevancy. This means we will be seeing a lot of sites built twice: once for Google, and once for Inktomi. And more sites mean more spam. Hopefully, in the end, the high-quality sites will come out on top of both engines. I imagine there will be either similar relevant sites, or different, but still relevant sites in both Google and Inktomi. Shawn Campbell is the co-founder and Chief Search Engine Optimizer at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.

Stay on Top Each month we review articles from leading industry magazines and newsletters. The following articles are the most interesting out of all the articles that were reviewed in the last two months. Click on the links below to read the full articles. AOL extends Google pact indefinitely http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,39020369,39117004,00.htm CNET News.com - October 08, 2003 - "Google executives said the extension of the AOL contract is a welcome validation that it is providing the company with competitive search capabilities and multiple opportunities to drive revenue. Susan Wojcicki, director of product management at Google, said the companies' businesses complement each other nicely." MSN Drops LookSmart http://www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/3088341 Clickz.com - October 8, 2003 - "Losing MSN is a major blow. The deal accounted for about 65 percent of LookSmart's listings-driven revenue. It leaves the company with distribution on a much smaller set of Web properties, such as meta search sites operated by InfoSpace and home pages viewed by Road Runner ISP subscribers." MSN's Expanded Overture Ads http://www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/3080661 Clickz.com - October 1, 2003 - "MSN Search rolled out a new format for showing paid listings. It hopes the change will allow it to carry more sponsored results while still keeping overall relevancy high." How Can Google's Gold Be Inktomi's Spam? http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3067191 SearchEngineWatch. - September 24, 2003 - "If you're offered a service to identify all the web sites linking to you and suggest other sites to contact about linking to you, you're not really spamming the engines. If you're told you need to regularly put up an updated page that's full of links, and that it will create thousands of links to you instantly, you're doing something with the intent of artificially boosting your link popularity. This is link spamming." Link Text - Revisited http://www.isedb.com/news/index.php?t=reviews&id=485 ISEDB.com - October 12, 2003 - Clearly, the optimal link to your site will contain your main keyword phrase. Often a webmasters ego will get in the way of optimization (this applies to title tags as well all too often), and just the company name will be used as link text "XYZ Ltd.".

Announcements Travel Health Help Site Overhaul www.travelhealthhelp.com is a resource for travelers on safety issues, vaccines and disease prevention. They are also a long-standing client of Red Carpet Web Promotion and use our services to attract potential clients to their site. We've recently redesigned their web site to provide more content and a fresh, professional new look. SEO buyers guide MarketingSherpa will soon be releasing their third edition of the Annual Buyer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization Firms. Red Carpet has been nominated to be included in the third edition of the guide which will soon be available at this URL: http://sherpastore.com/store/page.cfm/1759

Letters to the Editor Send your questions and comments for our next issue to news@redcarpetweb.com. Be as specific or general as you want -- other subscribers are probably wondering the same things you are. You should also let us know of any promotions, sales or new products on your web site.

Next Issue - New feature article - More on how Search Engines work - Stay on top: Articles from industry newsletters and magazines - And more... To subscribe to the Promotion Press, go to the subscribe page and fill in your email address. To unsubscribe from the Promotion Press, go to our unsubscribe page and fill in the address you subscribed with. This Newsletter is produced and published by Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. © 2000-2003