Source: 456bereastreet.com

At my day job, we’re contacted every now and then by clients asking about search engine positioning and optimisation. Most of the time the client has been approached by an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) consultant trying to talk them into paying lots of money for search engine optimisation. The SEO firms promise “guaranteed top results” and “submission to 500 000 search engines and directories”.

Many site owners are regularly contacted by scam companies of this kind, and it’s understandable that many take the bait and start paying for “top results and submission to everything”. After all, who doesn’t want their site to be highly ranked by search engines?

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By: Vivek gupta | Source: ysearchblog.com

Yahoo launched a redesign of Yahoo! Real Estate. As part of this you can now find up-to-date local mortgage rate information directly within web search. Go to Yahoo! and search for ‘[your city] mortgage rates’ (ex: Santa Clara mortgage rates).

The new shortcut displays three of the most popular loan types along with their daily rates and the week-over-week trend. The shortcut also has links to view nearby individual lender rates as well as state mortgage rate trend graphs. If you’re looking for a mortgage type that is not displayed, you can click the ‘More mortgage rates’ link for additional loan types. You can also select the ‘Calculate payment’ link to figure out your monthly payments and amortization schedule for your desired loan amount.

Now seems like a good time to bring you up to date on some additional Yahoo! Real Estate search shortcuts such as the home valuation shortcut and local real estate search shortcut for ‘[city] real estate’ queries (ex: ‘san Francisco real estate’). This shortcut helps users narrow their search and easily access local homes for sale by linking directly to MLS listings in the area in which they are searching.

The newly launched site also features a brand new design that leverages the Yahoo! Maps API with satellite imagery, and the Yahoo! Local API, both of which are available to the public.

With the new design, you can easily browse homes on a map and plot nearby points of interest such as schools, grocery stores, parks, and restaurants; many of which feature user reviews from Yahoo! Local. The site also allows you to research local market conditions such as an area’s housing inventory, median price, price trends, mortgage rates, and rate trends.

We hope these new features add breadth of service, usability and value to the more than 3 million home listings and existing real estate services Yahoo! offers. If you are looking to do some research, buy or sell, check out the new site and let us know what you think!

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By: Ben Charny | Source: marketwatch.com

According to those who follow the practice, click fraud is used mainly as a clandestine weapon by advertisers against their rivals. Using automated means, one company will click on its rival’s ads to increase the amount they must pay for it.

The practice also skews the effectiveness of an online ad campaign, because it leaves advertisers in the dark about which of its ads are of genuine interest to the customers it hopes to reach.

Click fraud illustrates s how new technologies that improve the effectiveness of a business operation can nevertheless have a down side.

Before the advent of Internet advertising in the late 1990s, advertising was paid for up front, and involved a finite number of ads that were placed on television, radio or in newspapers.

But online ads created a new payment model that required advertisers to pay for an ad only when it is clicked on.

Google and another startup called Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo in July 2003, then pushed Internet advertising a step further. They developed automated systems to serve up a limitless supply of ads that could be placed alongside the results of an Internet search query.

Read more at marketwatch.com

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