Solve the holiday jigsaw puzzle and the latest SEO news

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Weekly SEO news: 5 January 2010Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

We wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a great year 2010! May you enjoy peace, love, and happiness among friends and family.

Instead of our regular article, this weeks issue contains an easy holiday jigsaw puzzle that you can solve online. Have fun!

In the news: interesting 2009 statistics, the New York Times writes about search, Google vs. Baidu and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,

2. Search engine news and articles of the week

2009 statistics: 28% of websites use Google Analytics

"28% of websites have Google Analytics –- pretty impressive, while 12% of the sites have AdSense. [...] 5% of websites have a Twitter link and 5% have a Facebook URL, yet only 2% have both a Twitter and a Facebook URL."

Editor's note: you can get the raw data here.

New York Times: search, but you may not find

"Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself.

The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include 'search neutrality': the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance."

Related: NYT runs quack, self-serving anti-Google OpEd

Google v. Baidu: which company will win China?

"Beijing-based Baidu dominates: According to Jennifer Li, Baidu's chief financial officer, Baidu's market share for search in China was about 77% in the third quarter, up from 75.6% in the second quarter. Google, she says, lost share in China, dropping to 17% in the third quarter, from about 19% in the second quarter."

Many webmasters are afraid to update their AdWords accounts (discussion)

"Is anyone else experiencing this? We are afraid to do anything. We are not adding ads. We are not taking advantage of the new stuff google is offering. We just delete ads as they drop in QS. We are paralyzed and slowly dieing. The only good news is - so many other advertisers have had their accounts closed that our ROI has gone up. [...]

Yes indeed the 'Black-Box' analogy is very appropriate. If they do not want us, Google should come out and say so. If we are creating 'poor landing pages' then help us by telling us what you do want. I'm sure part of the secretive nature is to prevent hackers/spammer/fraudulent sites from skating around Google, but there are many legitimate sites that still want to use Google. At this point, It all sucks."

Our Google government

"In other words, according to Google, United States state governments have literally handed over our public data to be held and managed by a private company which has well-publicized partnerships with other governments such as China. The data is physically stored in Google's buildings, on Google's servers, managed by Google's employees. This means Google now controls our government’s access to it's own data."

Search engine newslets

MSNBot intentionally requesting bogus file names?Google Analytics adds features.Bing logo the worst new logo of 2009.China author set to sue Google over web book scan.A real-world test of Google Goggles visual search.Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

3. Google Universal results and Google custom result

If you check the position of your website in Google's search results with IBP's ranking checker then you can now choose if IBP should also consider Google Maps and Google News results.

IBP enables you to choose whether you just want to check the regular website results or if you also want to include the local search and news results. You can download the trial here.

IBP can also check Google custom results or the regular Google results by automatically deleting the customization cookies.

Using current tools is very important for search engine optimization. Things that worked last year might not work today. IBP is always up-to-date with the latest algorithms of Google and all other major search engines.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

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