DISQUS

With so much buzz in the online marketing blogosphere this is not at all surprising. There is no doubt Skittles got us talking about its campaign and visiting their site, no doubt contributing to the traffic spike. Did they reach the right audience though?

Hi Barry,

Glad to know you're reading SMS :)

Jordan,

Don't forget that we are not talking about Search Engine Land or Marketing Pilgrim here. They are much more than a website.

Why are you assuming that their diminishing popularity can be reversed with a site redesign? Maybe they have terrible reporters, biased coverage, etc. And if others like CNN and MSNBC have the same problem, maybe it is just the diminishing popularity of big brand media in general.

So if we don't assume that USA Today has redesigned the site to improve its overall fortunes than we can safely say the new design brought improved participation online, and therefore is a success.

Clearly Yahoo wants bloggers to keep using the service but doesn't want them to look at it as a marketing tool. I wonder how that's going to work...

SEL having a stronger team will be more popular, not much you can do about that. However, the SEW is not "doomed to fade into obscurity." They have a strong community base and a great forum. If they want to emerge from the shadow of Danny Sullivan, they will have to stop posting Danny's style (news recaps) and start coming up with the voice of their own.

I agree with Natasha; it's time to redesign the site. SEW design is stuck in the 90s. They still have links to pages that explain how to use search engines.

SEW, it's time to move on.

Jeremy,

There is no point for us to argue, we seem to be on the same page :) All I am saying is that there are ways to make AJAX crawable, or at least more search engine friendly. Of course, most people won't bother. So, yes, even if there are ways to optimize AJAX (just like there are ways to optimize Flash), website owners and designers will be compelled to create "simpler" pages in order to rank better. And, of course, ranking well on Google is the ultimate goal for many so indirectly Google will influence the success of AJAX.

A

As an immigrant myself, I can tell you that we try harder. We had to work for things that many locals (aka Americans) take for granted.

I don't know if immigrant businessmen have more "info/knowledge" than American entrepreneurs but a lot of them try harder and are willing to sacrifice more, maybe because they have little to lose.

Millions of people from the former Soviet Union, China and India had the ideas and the skills but were held back by their governments. Now, finally they have a chance to step into the playing field and they are racing twice as fast as everyone else, trying to catch up with the rest of the world.

Therefore, I am surprised by these numbers either.

Jeremy,

Excellent point. However, there are ways to code the page so that most of the content inside AJAX would be crawlable, or viewable by visitors with JavaScript disabled, if you're the usability junky ;)

A

Hey, at least this time they put up a form. About time.

Hi Andy,

I don't think I agree that PayPal is not threatened by Google Checkout. If you recall, back in July eBay had banned its customers from using Google Checkout.

Right now, a lot of merchants are still hesitant in using Google Checkout because of its "liberal" chargeback policies and the fact that it conceals too much customer information. However, Google is gaining ground with consumers by offering discounts on anything they buy. Soon consumers will expect merchants to have Google Checkout as one of their options because of the value it provides.

If you add on top of that the whole thing with the shopping cart icons in the sponsor listings and free credit card processing, merchants are running out of good reasons not to use Google Checkout.

Whatever Google's plans are for the moment, I think Google is flexible enough to take advantage of the new direction in which this service might be going. With that being said, PayPal has to think fast or lose their hold on the market.

Andrey

This is the case of "don't ask, don't tell" strategy. On one hand, search engines want to appear as "good guys" to the advertisers and keep this issue from hurting them on Wall Street, but at the same time they don't want to shoot themselves in the foot with doing too much.

I had a nice chat about this issue with Tom Cuthbert from ClickForensics a few weeks ago and he seemed to be very enthusiastic about coming up with some industrywide click fraud standards that everyone can accept.

Until Google and others continue to encourage services like AdSense for Parked Domains, there is little sense in talking about serious effort to combat click fraud.

Whoohoo. Andy promised and Andy delivered ;) Good stuff.