While Yahoo is the second most used search engine behind Google, when it comes to online shopping, it seems that Yahooers (Yahoo surfers) may actually be the biggest spenders online.

Wayne Perry, president of SiCap Industries, says that Yahoo surfers spend 30 percent more than other consumers on average.

SiCap Industries makes natural health products - distributing their products to around 10,000 stores worldwide - and also selling online via a number of partner web sites that sell natural health products.

“We haven’t figured out why, but our web stats show consumers referred by Yahoo definitely spend more money on our websites, and according to data collected from our retailers, yahoo surfers also spend more money in the stores that carry our products. This has been a consistent theme for nearly three years,” says Perry.
As they plan their internet budget for 2008 SiCap Industries is taking a closer look at their Yahoo surfers.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame has posted an article entitled : How to Handle a Google Penalty - And, an Example from the Field of Real Estate which includes a simple step by step process explaining how to check if your site is suffering from a Google penalty - and very importantly - how to deal with it.

The flow chart Rand has come up with steps you through several simple questions (with yes and no answers) to help you determine a strategy for dealing with a Google penalty. Here’s a summary of Rands post - including a textual representation of his diagram.

Step One - Is your site indexed in Google?

Try googling site:yourdomainname.com If your site is displayed, go to step 2 . If none of your pages come up - or if only your home page appears, then you may have some sort of penalty.

Login to Google Webmaster Central, validate your site and see if Google responds that your site is penalised. If so, clean up your site (by removing anything spammy - see Google Webmaster Guidelines and in particular the quality guidelines) and submit a reinclusion request within the Webmaster Central console.

Step Two - Do you rank for your domain name ?

Try Googling www.yourdomainname.com - If your site shows up, skip to step3 . If no, then you may have some sort of penalty.

Penalty? login to Google Webmaster Central, validate your site and see if Google responds that your site is penalised.

No penalty? Then it may be a trust issue. Review all your links, see if you have potentially bad outgoing links - and get rid of them. Drop paid link campaigns that you feel may be hurting your rankings. Drop link exchanges that you feel may be hurting your trust. Clean up other areas of the site that may seem a bit “gray”. Submit a reinclusion request via Webmaster Central.

Step Three - Do you rank in top 20 for some of your unique terms?

Try Googling some unique (or relatively unique) phrases from you site. If your pages are listed then you don’t have a Google penalty. If they don’t, then you may have some sort of penalty.

This may be as a result of Google discounting (or ignoring) the “link value” transferred to you by a bunch of your link partners. Now that those links don’t pass any value to you anymore, you probably won’t be ranking as well as you once were. If this is the case remove links back to your “suspect” link partners, and submit a reinclusion request.

Also review your site content and do some link building for great high quality, natural links.

Finally…

The above process is not a panacea, and will probably not solve all your problems, but it’s definitely a good starting point to diagnose and help address suspected Google penalties.

Rands article has also includes some great real world examples… so make sure that you drop by and take a look.

Google has just updated their Google Webmaster Guidelines page with clearer and more detailed information. According to Google, following these guidelines will help them find, index, and rank your site.

In particular, the Quality Guidelines section outlines some of the dodgy practices that may lead to a site being penalised or removed entirely from the Google index. The “Quality Guidelines section now also has hyperlinks to more pages with more details.

Heres an overview :

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site does participates in affiliate programs, make sure that your site also adds value in itself. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

You may be aware that Google has very recently rolled out a new search result platform named Universal Search. With this new program, Google has begun integrating information from some of its vertical search platforms (such as video, maps, news etc..) into its regular web search results.

Universal Search presents an opportunity for small business owners to be more involved in search with less technical expertise required. The opportunity arises because of the relativley new and less competitive nature of Google’s vertical platforms.

This article provides an overview of some of the different search elements which may now be displayed in amongst the “standard” search results.

Google Video : is a relatively new field – simply adding a video to your Web site with a good descriptor in the file name can help you take advantage of video search.  Do a search on “video search optimisation” for advice on how to optimise for video.

Basically, you want to name your files accurately, using keyword-rich file names. Create a keyword-rich title tag and description, look for anchor text opportunities, include RSS feeds, create a video site map, and optimize the content on the Web page from which you launch your video. Then submit to video search engines like Blinkx. By uploading your video to various video search sites like Google Video, YouTube.com or Metacafe, you can expand that video’s reach exponentially, and increase the chances of it coming up in a Google Universal Search.

Google Maps: Also known as Google Local, this is already a major part of the search results. If you don’t already have a presence, make sure you visit the Google Local Business Center and sign yourself up for a free listing. This feature-rich program will allow you to build a “landing page” that will help bring visitors to your Web site.

Google News: Press releases will be indexed and displayed as “news” so strategically releasing information about new products and services can result in having Google News pick up your information and display it as “news.”

Google Image Search: Images on your site not only sell your product, they can become a way for visitors to find your Web site via a Google Image Search. Use descriptive keyword-rich file names and alt tags – always keeping in mind it’s important to label your photos with accurate descriptions. Instead of saying “beachfrontunit.jpg” say “gold-coast-beach-front-unit.jpg.”

You can gain some traffic and some search engine presence by looking at just a few of these ideas. Help and step-by-step explanations are out there; a few simple searches can teach you a lot about the procedures necessary for adding these features to your online marketing campaigns.

The “official” Google Blog has provided a basic but clear explanation of the robots exclusion protocol. In this blog post, Google explained how the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET META tags function. In short:

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

Metasearch engine Dogpile has recently published their 2007 “search overlap” study. The first study, released in 2005, found that 84.9 percent of results on search engines were unique to one engine and not found on competitor sites. The study involved Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask and also found that among 12,570 random user-defined queries just over 1 percent of first page search results were the same across the engines.

The 2007 study has found further divergence and even less overlap: only 0.6 percent first page search results were the same across the engines.

Here’s a high-level summary of the findings of the April, 2007 study (with figures rounded), conducted in conjunction with Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University:

• The percent of total results unique to one search engine was established to be nearly 90 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by any two search engines was established to be approx 9 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by three search engines was established to be 2 percent.
• The percent of total results shared by the top four search engines was established to be less than 1 percent.

The majority of first page results are unique:

• On average, 70 percent of Google first page search results were unique to Google.
• On average, 80 percent of Yahoo! and Live first page search results were unique to Yahoo!

Top search result was different across engines:

Only 4 percent of the #1 ranked non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines for a given query, down from 7 percent in the July 2005 overlap study.

Sponsored links on Google and Yahoo:

• Less than 5 percent of Yahoo! and Google sponsored links overlap for a given query.
• For 23 percent of all queries, Google did not return a sponsored link where Yahoo! returned one or more.
• For 10 percent of all queries Yahoo! did not return a sponsored link where Google returned one or more.