We all know that Google loves new content and a blog can be a great way to continually create fresh content.  Many companies find that a blog becomes an integral part of their overall SEO strategy to drive more search engine traffic and increase Page Rank.  However, writing a blog post several times a month can get old over time.

Writer’s block?  You betcha!  The answer? Convince other people to get into the fun of content creation!

Sometimes employees are excited about this prospect, sometimes they need more motivation. So how can you motivate employees to write blog posts?  Well, there are a variety of ways limited only by your imagination.  One such way is to offer a contest where for a period of time you accept entries for best blog submission.  Ideally, you should be able to collect enough entries from one contest to have blog material for several posts. You can offer a prize for the best submission, or perhaps the best submission in each category if you receive a large number of entries.  Make sure to set criteria, it helps produce quality posts.

What criteria should you use to ensure good content? You might have to spend some time thinking about your goals setting a clear blog strategy to develop criteria that make sense for you. We’ll cover that in a follow-up blog post next week.

Prizes. Make the reward enough to be a true incentive, but not so much that it breaks the bank.  Keep in mind that companies are spending big bucks on Search Engine Optimization and the SEO value of a current and quality blog is worth a lot more than a $10 gift certificate to Starbucks!

• The prize can simply be cash or a gift card
• A prized toy or fun item that can be used or displayed around the office.  Rock’em Sock’em Robots or a quality motion-sensitive fart machine are classics and are always appreciated by your more sophisticated and mature co-workers!  ;o)
• A cheesy trophy can be fun.
• Lunch with the CEO or a member of the senior staff to bestow a little recognition and thank you for your contribution.  If you’ve been looking for the right time to chat them up about that raise or promotion you’ve been wanting, now’s your chance!
• A free paid day off.
• Hold a department versus department challenge to see which group can write the best blog post.  Winner gets bragging rights plus a group celebration/reward.
• Do a monthly contest for the best blog submission and record the winners each month.  At the end of 6-12 months do a drawing from among those winners and they get a weekend vacation for two.
• You can even use analytics to track how much traffic each blog post drives to deeper pages on your site and hold a contest around that!

As I said, the possibilities are endless, limited only by your imagination.  In the end, you should have enough quality blog posts that you will rarely have to worry about a languishing blog or lacking enough content to make your site interesting to search engines.  Not bad for a bit of blog navel-gazing and some money for prizes.

Written by Matthew McKool

Okay, so the first installment of Link Love Monday was actually born to two proud parents on a Monday. The next installment hit on a Tuesday. Therefore, it’s only fitting that Link Love “Someday” occur on a Friday eventually. Things have been quite hectic around here to say the least, but due diligence will be paid to ensure a specific day of the week (most likely Friday) is linked with love. On to the links!

 
Link: Tracking Transactions Back to the Initial Referrer with Google Analytics

Love tracking your websites progress at an even more granular level than Google Analytics normally allows. Let’s say you’re running a PPC campaign and the user clicks on your ad, heads to the page, but does not initially fill out a form or make a purchase. He or she needs time to mull. Some of us are mullers. We need time. The next day the user heads to Google, types in the name of your company, lands on your website and then fills out a form or makes the purchase. By default, this transaction would be credited to organic search even though the user initially found you through your PPC campaign. The transaction can be tracked the other way as well, where the user initially finds you via natural search, but returns via paid search and makes the purchase then. Either way, this will allow you to get a better idea of how well your well ranked website and paid search campaigns work in tandem.

“Google Analytics, by default, will attribute transactions to the last referrer. While this is all fine and good, there are some situations where you would really like to be able to track these transactions back to the initial referrer rather than the last referrer.”

Link: 12 Tips for Designing an Excellent Checkout Process

Love optimizing your website after the organic or paid search click. Many potential clients come to us looking only for search engine optimization and/or paid search campaign management — and that’s perfectly okay. However, many people do not think about optimizing the site itself. Does the navigation bar remain in place as the user navigates through your site? Is there a visible call-to-action in the same spot across the entirety of the site? How complicated is the checkout process? All of these issues can cause users to leave your site due to confusion or frustration if they cannot find what they’re looking for in a timely manner. From my personal experience, if a website requires me to register to participate or make a purchase, the minute I see this requirement is the same minute I hit the back button (unless I cannot live without the product or participation). Check out these 12 tips that can make your checkout process that much more efficient for your users — you’ll likely improve your conversion rate.

“8. Keep the checkout interface simple - The checkout process is different to the rest of the browsing experience on your site. During this process your customers aren’t shopping — they’re making the purchase. This means all the browsing controls are redundant here and would only distract your customers from the task at hand. Eliminate these unnecessary elements — e.g. product category links, top products, latest offers, and so on — to keep the interface simple.”

Link: Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.

Love the recurring theme of tracking your work. If you work with an agency that a) does not track your websites progress through various metrics or b) tracks the websites progress in the form of handing you charts filled with numbers and without explaining what they mean…well…then perhaps it’s time to do some shopping for yourself. Measuring your websites progress through a combination of metrics, across multiple channels, and uncovering what these numbers mean is incredibly powerful. If there is one area where you can get a muscular leg up on your competition, it would be through early adoption of data-driven marketing and advertising initiatives.

“…Still, getting advertising agency employees to rely on data is difficult, agencies say. And as people trained on Wall Street migrate to Madison Avenue, executives anticipate battles between creative types and wonks.  Traditional ad agencies still don’t have budgets that allow for a lot of digital experimentation, Mr. Herman says. He notes that most traditional agencies “make the bulk of their money in print, radio and television.”  So even as this area becomes increasingly technology-driven, old ways of doing business and clients reluctant to embrace radically new approaches mean that the advertising culture won’t change overnight.”

Link: 10 Ways to Re-Energize Your Blog Today

Love your blog. Please. Don’t let it sit and waste away. Certainly participate in the latest social media platform if it fits within the scope of your overall online marketing strategy, but do NOT leave your blog heaving for breath on the roadside — especially if you “don’t have anything” to write about. Not only is figuring out what to write about as simple as taking these 10 tips and running with them, but your blog can serve as the hub of all of your social media efforts — direct users back to your blog and then track where they go from there. Talk to them. You can be even more authentic with 250 words as opposed to 140 characters.

“1. Grab your local newspaper – pick one column (it could be a news item or op-ed piece) and blog your own perspective on it.”

PS – that’s what we’re looking for, your perspective — subjectivity. “There are no facts, only interpretation.” Even if you don’t believe that, keep it in mind and it will help you write stirring blog posts.

 
Link: The Local Business Center Dashboard Opens Its Doors

Love more data on your Google Local Business listing! I know, you just can’t get enough data (alright, so maybe there is such thing as data-overload). Additional data includes:

• Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
• Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business’ website or requested driving directions to the business.
• Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for “tea” or “coffee”?
• Zip codes where driving directions originate: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

Link: Microsoft’s Bing Vs. Google: Head to Head Search Results

Love competition. Microsoft recently rolled out it’s new search engine, Bing, to the masses. It’s still too early to know whether or not people will change their search patterns and turn to Bing instead of Google (I doubt this will happen anytime soon, personally), but competition is good. Take a look at this article over at Search Engine Land to see how the search engines differ for a number of search terms. Side note: they’re certainly going after the David Letterman watching demographic. It seemed Bing made an appearance at each commercial break last night.

Last week a new precedent for punishing cyberbullies was set as Missouri mom Lori Drew was convicted of three misdemeanors for violating MySpace’s terms of service in a complex hoax that led to a young girl’s suicide.

Megan Meier was thirteen when she had a falling out with Drew’s daughter, Sarah. Drew took it upon herself, with the help of a teenaged employee (who was given immunity for testifying against Drew), to set up a fake MySpace page under the name Josh Evans, complete with fake photos and a fake life story as to why this “new boy in town” couldn’t call Megan on the phone or why she’d never seen him at school.

This went on for weeks, and Megan, who had a history of depression and ADHD, started to care about the boy online who told her she was pretty and made her feel special. Even though her parents closely monitored her online activity, she still grew attached.

Drew and the others used “Josh Evans” to flirt with the girl, telling her she was “sexi,” the indictment charged.

Around Oct. 7, 2006, Megan was told that “Josh” was moving away, prompting the girl to write: “aww sexi josh ur so sweet if u moved back u could see me up close and personal lol.”

Several days later, “Josh” urged the girl to call and added: “i love you so much.”

- Chicago Tribune

Eventually Drew decided the ruse had gone far enough and the tone of the messages started to change. So, suddenly “Josh” heard Megan was mean, a bad person, someone who treated her friends badly. He didn’t want to talk to her anymore. The last thing Megan told “Josh” before running up to her room and hanging herself in the closet was “You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over.”

At the time, there weren’t laws in place governing whether what Drew and her accomplice did was a crime, but Drew was convicted by bloggers before the courts ever got to her. The case stayed quiet for a year as the FBI sorted through the story, but slowly it gained more and more exposure.

There are no pictures of Megan, and the paper doesn’t name the family responsible for all this torment, out of “respect” for their daughter, nor does it name the single mother, out of respect for her anonymity and community decorum, which on one hand is understandable but on the other hand, actually f*** that. F*** your community, f*** any hope for cordial ties with those people, and ex-friend of Megan’s, f*** your parents. One age group’s peer pressure is another age group’s “I don’t want to be the b**** who talked to the newspaper.”

- Jezebel.com

When the police wouldn’t release her name to the public after the stories came out, a blogger named Sarah Wells did her own detective work and posted her name and address. The tidal wave of outrage grew and the Drews were shunned by their community, but the police’s hands were tied – mad as the nation was, there was still no legal basis to punish Lori Drew.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles thought otherwise as they believed they had jurisdiction over the case because MySpace is headquartered in Beverly Hills. On May 15, 2008, Lori Drew was indicted on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On November 26th, she was convicted of three misdemeanor offenses of accessing protected computers without authorization to inflict emotional harm, reduced from felonies. Drew faces up to three years in jail and a fine up to $300,000 if she receives the maximum sentence.

So what now? What can we do to safeguard our social networks? MySpace issued a statement condemning cyberbullying after Drew’s indictment, but how can this be prevented? Children and adults alike need to be taught that bullying on the Internet is just as harmful as physical abuse – what is the role of the Internet professional to help prevent cyber harassment, and where do our responsibilities lie? Should violating a social network’s terms of service be a crime? Should Drew have received stricter punishment? One can only hope this outcome will quell any ideas of potential Internet bullies, but in between now and then, hopefully a real solution will arise.

Friday ended an era at Apogee Search – our resident Office Mom, Connie Smith, is hanging up her 1,000,000 hats. Those who know Connie know that she puts everyone before herself, literally. For this reason, all of Apogee paid homage to Connie on her last day.

Lunch was had, stories were told, cake was enjoyed, and presents were delivered. Apogeeans past and present were in attendance. In true SEM style, we could not let it end there. The paid search analysts created a going away blog using www.blogspot.com where anyone can post messages directly to The Best Apogee Mom Ever. In addition, the team also launched a Google Adwords campaign dedicated solely to Connie.

In general, the term “Connie Smith” generates a decent amount of traffic with almost 18,000 searches a month. Since our tribute is a personal campaign, we want to eliminate as much negative search traffic as possible. Basically, we do not want searchers that aren’t Apogee employees (former and current) to click on the ad.

Therefore, we made the campaign an exact match. This means that the ad only shows if “Connie Smith” is searched. Thus, the ad will not be shown for searches like “Connie Smith apples,” “Connie the Smith,” or “Connie Smiths.”

We also realize that the term “Connie Smith” can still potentially bring in a large amount of traffic when put in the scope of the entire U.S. For this reason, we geographically targeted the campaign to Austin, Texas only. Any searches coming from outside of the Austin area will not trigger the ad.

All in all, the farewell celebration for Connie was tearful, but the blog and paid search campaign live on.

Blogs! Everyone loves a blog. Blogs are a great way to pursue long-tail keywords, speak directly to your customers, and funnel readers to your website. Is a corporate blog a good idea for your brand, though? Maybe.

Corporate blogs can help you reach out to consumers, but solely product-driven content gets boring quickly. 37 Signals has a great blog about business, design and whatever else strikes their fancy, while also maintaining a separate blog for their products. Blogging is not just about shilling for yourself, but also about having a dialog between you and the people on your website looking for interesting things to read/see/do/buy.

Great things to blog about:

• Commentary on an article/news piece relevant to your business
• Post a video introduction to a main office, key staff member, or a new product
• Product tips and tricks
• Cool user-generated content (i.e. “Look, someone remixed our jingle and made a music video!”)

The time commitment involved in blogging is not something to be glossed over. A corporate blog doesn’t need to be updated every single day to be effective, but to get any SEO value out of it you need to update it consistently. Google likes indexing and ranking blogs because they consider them fresh and informative.

An example from Apogee’s client base: one of our clients has a blog that Google started mapping to a keyword we didn’t want it to, pulling its rankings for that particular term sixty places lower. Once we fixed the problem, however, its rankings had bounced back within an hour. Google had re-indexed the blog almost immediately. This is probably because our client’s blog is interesting, informative, and well-written, but also well-maintained.

If you’re not going to maintain your blog, then there’s no real point in having one. Indeed, a dead blog not only looks bad, but can take up space in the rankings, competing against the rest of your website.

The time and creativity invested in a corporate blog can return a direct connection to your most devoted customers, feedback on products, and viral marketing through links and word of mouth.

This is the first post in a series about social media.

Apogee launched our very first social media client in September and it has been quite an adventure bringing their corporate presence to the masses through Twitter, Facebook and the like. It’s been exciting to set up new channels of contact between our client and their constituents, and we’ve learned a lot already.

Why social media? What’s the difference between social media and the rest of the web?

Without Social Media: You bookmark a link to a muffin recipe.
With Social Media: When you bookmark a link to a muffin recipe on delicious.com, not only can you access the bookmark from any computer, but people looking for muffin recipes on delicious.com will find the one you bookmarked, as well as many other bookmarked recipes and other links. You may also find out that someone else has made the recipe and it gave them hives, thereby avoiding the dire consequences of said muffins before even cracking an egg.

Without Social Media: You can read about spaceships on a website from one source.
With Social Media: You can read about spaceships on a Wikipedia page, which links to user-created informational spaceship videos on YouTube, which leads you to a Facebook group for like-minded spaceship enthusiasts.

Web 2.0/Social Media is information by committee. It’s the internet equivalent of the town crier, oral histories of old learned men, beauty shop gossip queens, and the local paper all in one medium. And it is remarkably efficient in connecting like-minded peoples to desired resources.

What’s in it for you?
All social media are not created equal, and not all outlets are appropriate for any given entity. A creative mind can think of appropriate content for video, text, and image sharing. But content generation can be very time consuming and in social media quality is often more important than quantity. Just because you can split all your time evenly between Facebook, Myspace and Twitter doesn’t mean you should.

In the next parts of this series, we’ll examine the pros and cons of various social media outlets, and which would be right for your business.

After more and more evidence that an economic downturn is coming, marketing departments and firms everywhere are bracing for a hit. Marketing has historically been on the receiving end of lay offs once a recession kicks in, but will this ring true for those in search engine marketing? Withstanding the dot com bust, SEM has yet to be a part of a major, all-encompassing economic recession. We think SEM is well positioned to vis a vis any inclement economic weather, and here are 5 reasons why SEM may avoid the traditional marketing guillotine.

5. Before anything gets cut it gets analyzed
Traditional marketing, in terms of advertising, is heavily influenced by reach, which is not as scalable as some of today’s search engine tactics. When measuring marketing’s effectiveness during a recession, decisions are prudently based on ROI. With traditional advertising’s reach being affected by newer technology such as Tivo, and even cell phones, advertisers are now forced to look for new and economically viable ways of distributing their message. With its on-demand results and completely measurable analytics, paid search certainly falls into an area of marketing where ROI can easily be distinguished.

4. A Plethora of poisons
Paid and natural search are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEM today. Right now the trend seems to be dipping your feet into social media before diving into PPC or SEO. Finding a way to implement accounts on any social media site (Digg, Facebook, Myspace, You Tube, etc) that can get your name out there in a controlled, viral environment is a great way to reach large audiences with a small budget. Granted this is all hearsay, social media’s genuine and versatile messages, could be a very effective and low-cost recession-time marketing tool for any company. However waiting until the recession to implement a campaign could be costly. Now is the time to get started, recessions don’t take kindly to stragglers.

3. Timeliness
Implementing traditional marketing is a timely and costly process. Companies know this from the start which is why it is easy to immediately write off marketing. However implementing a paid search campaign typically takes only days or at most weeks, and is an investment that will glean a significant amount of keyword conversion data that will help properly target and focus a natural search campaign even during a recession.

2. Innovation
Recessions usually turn industries into being reactive instead of proactive, but SEM is built around exploiting and utilizing the web’s endless venues. While I doubt we’ll see major ventures like new search engines or pets.com 2.0, sites like howcast.com and hulu.com have the possibility to become major portals for SEM business.

1. Cost
Any way you look at it traditional advertising is more expensive than SEM. However that raises the question– will the recession raise the cost of SEM and finally make it a part of traditional advertising? If so this entire post could be bunk, it could also be bunk as of right now. No one knows how a recession could affect SEM because SEM has never been affected by a recession, but if you look at the overwhelming evidence of both its increase in use and effectiveness, it’s easy to see why it could be one of marketing’s best allies when trying to stave off the R word.

October was a tough month for PayPerPost (PPP) bloggers. Many PPP opportunities required a blog to have a certain PageRank to be eligible to take them. Unfortunately, right before the holidays, a very large number of PPP sites saw their PageRank drop to zero. Suddenly, they were unqualified for the better paying blogging opportunities.

Posts from Matt Cutts at Google confirmed that this was an intentional penalty, not just the usual suspect data from the Google Toolbar. The belief passed through the forums and the blogosphere that these sites had lost all ability to provide benefits through links (e.g. “link juice”).

Meanwhile, we were still seeing our clients benefit from PPP opportunities, both in direct traffic (suggesting that the sites had not lost search engine rankings themselves) and in ranking benefit (suggesting that link juice was still being passed. Clearly, something else was going on and I was determined to discern the facts scientifically. The details on my investigation follow.

Hypothesis: The “penalty” Google imposed on PPP blogs is more cosmetic than actual.

Prediction: If the penalized sites are truly unable to pass any link juice, then a link from that site to a page on another site will have no impact on Google’s rankings.

To test this theory, I had a group of sites each use unique, fantasy anchor text to link to a brand new page (unindexed and never before linked) on a single site (so that there were no variances of site trust on the destination page). The destination pages all included different excerpts from the text of Beowulf (so that the content of the page was unique across the site) and did not include the targeted keyword on the page. If the destination page later returned in a search for that keyword, it would be shown that the site was still passing link juice.

The anchor texts were created using a password generator, using six or more characters in length, and had no more than five hundred (500) Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in Google at the time of creation (many were misspellings of other words or used as forum logins by others, so they did have a few SERPs).

Methodology: The test consisted of eighty-three (83) sites. Fifty-four (54) were PPP blogs that had been “penalized” by Google (PPP Group) and twenty-nine (29) were non-PPP sites (Control Group). The members of the PPP Group were located via a posting on the PPP forum. We asked PPP bloggers that had been penalized to participate in this test so that we could determine whether their blogs still provided any SEO linking benefit.

Each blogger was given a unique combination of anchor text and destination page on the target site and was told to place the link on the homepage of their blog. Once the links were live, the target site was monitored daily to determine if/when it started ranking for any of the fantasy anchor texts in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The test was allowed to run for six weeks.

Results: Of the PPP Group, fourteen (14) caused pages to be ranked in Google (25.93%) and thirty-two (32) to be ranked in Yahoo (59.26%). Of the Control Group sites, fifteen (15) ranked in Google (51.72%) and sixteen (16) ranked in Yahoo (55.17%). None of the sites caused pages to be ranked in MSN.

Conclusions: Clearly, the claims that PPP blogs have lost all ability to pass link juice have been definitively proven false.

However, the possibility that an actual penalty has been imposed still remains. The PPP sites pushed pages into Google at half the rate of Yahoo, while the Control Group pushed pages into Google and Yahoo at very similar rates. This suggests that Google may have lowered the actual PageRank for the pages. Whether this was to zero so that only the link juice from the page itself is passed (none of the link juice coming into the page would be passed) or to some other amount is unknown.

Alternatively, this differential rate may be due to Google’s attempts to reduce the influence of Google Bombs. The anchor texts for the PPP Group were actually somewhat more competitive than that for the Control Group. On average, the keywords in the PPP Group had 196 SERPs while the keywords in the Control Group had 129 SERPs on average, a difference of about one-third. If the efficacy of the Google Bomb filters is based upon the number of pages that rank for a keyword (as many believe), then this could account for much of the delta.

Another lesson learned is that it appears that MSN will not rank a page based only on the anchor text of the links coming into the page. The key phrase must be on the page itself.

Commentary: It’s very possible that the penalty imposed by Google is not purely cosmetic, and that an actual lowering of PageRank did occur. As it happens, PageRank is no longer all that large a component of Google’s relevancy calculation, so even if PageRank was actually dropped to zero, PPP posts still have definite SEO benefit for advertisers.

That’s no consolation to Posties who lost revenue due to not being able to take on new paid blogging opportunities, and I sympathize with their pain. Unfortunately, Izea’s connecting the sale of links to PageRank was a sure-fire way to draw some ugly attention from Google. Hopefully Izea/PayPerPost advertisers will be willing to accept RealRank as a suitable proxy for PageRank.

Further testing will be needed to determine whether or not the penalty was cosmetic, and if not, how severe a penalty was imposed. I still believe that at best the penalty is quite limited. Google’s ability to programmatically determine which blogs are doing paid blogging seems too still be somewhat ineffectual. Many PPP blogs were not hit with the penalty, and there are numerous reports of sites that have never had anything to do with PPP having their PageRank zero’ed out. The risk of collateral damage was quite high and even a purely cosmetic penalty would achieve Google’s goal of punishing the sale of PageRank. It’s probable that Google didn’t want to take that risk.

The next round of testing will begin in a week or two. If you’d like to take part, please drop me a line through the blog.

I’ve spent the last couple of days at the inaugural BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. While there have been numerous mentions of search, there has been little that was blogworthy for a search marketing blog. One session, “A Futurist Look at Web 10.0″ was different. The presenter, Thomas Frey, is executive director and senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute.

He pointed out several areas where search is effective today:

• Text to text
• Text to image
• Text to audio
• Text to video

There are a number of areas where search is not effective today:

• Image to image
• Image to video
• Audio to audio
• Video to video

In other words, we only have effective search when the input mechanism is text.

In the future, we will be able to search on smell, taste, texture, reflectivity, harmonic vibration, or even specific gravity. I wonder how many of these are being worked on by Google currently.

Thomas also pointed out that while we have effective search online. We have very rudimentary search abilities in the real world. He used the example of losing his glasses. He couldn’t exactly connect to Google and have it tell him where the glasses were. While RFID is an interim step towards this, there is much room for improvement.

When I looked at my list of action items for today I realized there was much to do in the world of client services, so much so that I was hoping I wouldn’t have to post a blog. However after seeing the posting on Search Engine Land that read “7 out of 10 Americans Experience Search Engine Fatigue” I knew more work was about to be put on my plate.

The survey shows a variety of bulletproof facts compiled by Kelton Research concerning the current “state of search.” Below is a small sample of some of the findings:

…72 percent of online searchers are experiencing “Search Engine Fatigue,” meaning they become impatient or frustrated when they are unable to quickly find the exact information they need…

…Of those experiencing this modern day ailment, three out of four physically leave their computer without finding the information they are looking for…

…65.4 percent of Americans say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines…

Physically leave their computer? Naturally after reading that fact I thought to myself, “If 3 out of 4 people are frustrated enough to leave the den and move to the foyer because of my shoddy optimization, then I’m out of a job. Awesome—half day.” However after doing some research (that took a shade under a minute) I found that Autobytel.com, the first online car-buying site, was opportunely conducting this study.

Let me stop you right here. If you think Autobytel is trying to sway traffic from the search engines directly to the Autobytel site you are mistaken because according to the survey “67% feel that third-party sites such as Autobytel are “mostly similar,” without offering “substantial differences.” However if you think Autobytel is trying to sway traffic from the search engines to their new flagship site Myride.com you are correct because according to the survey Myride.com is the “antidote for consumers who experience “Search Engine Fatigue” through its industry-specific results designed to connect consumers to all things automotive from across the Web.”

Now I’m all up for studies that make a case for new products or service offerings, but why pick on search engines? Why not Starbucks? Oh right, because on a previous study from Kelton Research 89% of respondents said they would rather give up Starbucks for a year than go without WiFi. A VoIP provider sponsored that survey.

As mentioned before I’m all up for studies making a case for new products or services. It’s good practice, but only if its accurate; and only if it allows the product to speak for itself without having to bring in an irrelevant third party. Bringing in the search engine industry for this study was an extraneous ploy for ground-breaking material (link bait). However after reading the disclaimer that: “…Although it is Kelton Research’s intent to provide accurate and up-to-date information, no warranty, express or implied, is made regarding accuracy, adequacy, completeness, legality, reliability or usefulness of any information contained on the pages of this site,” I’m not surprised.

I will however be looking forward to the next Kelton Research study “Bicycles: Erosion’s Friend, Environment’s Foe,” sponsored by Oil Refineries ‘R’ Us.