Happy birthday, YouTube! Yes, YouTube is celebrating its sixth birthday this month, and hasshared a couple of impressive new statistics: 48 hours of video are now uploaded per minute, and YouTube has surpassed 3 billion views per day.

In November, YouTube challenged users to increase the number of videos uploaded per minute from 35 hours per minute to 48, and they have delivered. One year ago, YouTube reported 24 hours of video uploaded per minute, and 2 billion views per day.

here are plenty of impressive stats out there on YouTube. One of the most interesting ones was revealed back in April, when the YouTube blog reported that 30 percent of videos make up 99 percent of views on the site.

Some more recent stats on YouTube:

• 13 million: Number of hours of video that were uploaded in 2010.
• 60 days > 60 years: More video is uploaded in two months than the three major U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) combined created in six decades.
• 30 percent: Amount of overall traffic coming from the U.S. YouTube is localized in 25 countries and 43 languages.
• 700 billion: Number of playbacks in 2010.
• 10,000: Number of partners, hundreds of which make six figures a year.
• More than 7,000: Number of hours of full-length movies and shows.
• 2 billion: Number of global video views per week being monetized.
• 10 percent: Amount of videos available in HD.
• 100 years: Amount of video scanned daily by Content ID, which is used by more than 1,000 partners, including every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio, and record label.
• 4 million: Number of people connected and auto-sharing to at least one social network.
• 100 million: Number of daily mobile views.

Continue reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2073962/New-YouTube-Statistics-48-Hours-of-Video-Uploaded-Per-Minute-3-Billion-Views-Per-Day?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29

Google recently alerted website owners of a recent trend involving the hacking of websites to insert acanonical tag and point it to the hacker’s site. Is your site at risk? How can you protect against it?

There’s a great discussion going on over at Webmaster World about this topic. To give credit where it’s due, it’s quite a bright attack that – if undetected – stands to provide potentially more SEO value than the vast majority of spam tactics that I’ve witnessed in my decade plus of experience.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s quickly define the canonical tag.

What Is The Canonical Tag?

For years, webmasters wrestled with the issue of duplicate content. The majority of these cases were caused by simple product duplication on a series of listings pages.

Let’s say a website sells blue widgets. They are ordered on one page by size, on another by color, and on a third by price. That’s three pages with fundamentally the same content.

Google will try to determine the best possible page to show in the results. Before the canonical tag, webmasters couldn’t define it for themselves, resulting in scenarios where less desirable pages were appearing in the SERPs.

In 2009 Google announced support to the rel=canonical tag allowing website owners to place a tag in their headers indicating which page was to be considered the primary result. Later that year Google announced that the canonical tag was also going to work across domains allowing webmasters of multiple sites with similar content to define specific content as fundamentally sourced from a different domain.

The Power Of The Canonical Tag

For any hack to be worth doing it first must hold value. This leads us to the question of whether or not an exploitation of the canonical tag is worth doing in the first place. I found a statement from Google’s Matt Cutts on a related topic very interesting. It takes some reading between the lines so watch the following video from April 2011 and then read on.

Continue reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2072455/Hacked-Canonical-Tags-Coming-Soon-To-A-Website-Near-You?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29

Having incorrect or private URLs show up in a Google search result can be a pain. Trying to remove them is no party, either. Google has now made it a bit easier for Webmasters to remove URLs from the Google index.

The Webmaster Central team announced an update to the Remove URL tool today.

Previously, the tool first required webmasters to block access to the page or file via robots.txt before it could be removed. That requirement has now changed. Google Webmaster tools requires site owners to verify their sites. So the Webmaster Tools team will now simply accept Remove URL requests. Kind of.

Once you use the tool to request a URL to be removed, Google will consider that request “temporary.” This means that while Google won’t display the URL in its results, GoogleBot will continue to crawl the URL for the next 90 days. During this time, you have the option to change your mind and revoke your remove URL request.

Continue reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2071671/Google-Simplifies-URL-Removal-in-Webmaster-Tools?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29

Local marketing agency, Search Control, gives corporations, small businesses, and individuals the ability to control their search results on the largest and most popular search engines. Search Control is able to do so with the combined talents of its professional team of Internet technology connoisseurs, as well as the proprietary i-Skore, which calculates the web presence for each client.

The ground-breaking web services expected by clients of Search Control are now guaranteed to give even more accurate Google search results, with the introduction of the i-Skore 2.0. Originally, the i-Skore is an algorithm unique to Search Control, which combines all of the search results from the three major search engines for a given client, and assesses the value of each one. The i-Skore weighs the good search results against the bad search results, and thus, uses the final measurement of the client’s web presence to form the foundation from which to build the campaign.

The increasing presence and magnitude of social media websites have lead to the implementation of the i-Skore 2.0. The presence of image and video hosting sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, are now accounted for in ways like never before during each calculation of the i-Skore. The fresh i-Skore 2.0 even determines which social media and directory profiles are considered “unmanaged” and are in need of updates. Now, businesses and individuals, from medical practices to the entertainment industry, can uncover an even more accurate i-Skore with Search Control.

About Search Control

Search Control’s team is made up of experts in fields such as content writing, blogging, social media, web design, search engine marketing, and reputation management. These skills allow Search Control to offer top of the line search engine marketing to clients from all over the United States. To learn more about Search Control, visit the website at http://searchcontrol.com

More information can be found online at http://www.searchcontrol.com

Press Release: http://www.free-press-release.com/news-search-control-provides-even-more-search-engine-control-with-the-i-skore-2-0-1305153888.html

I was at brunch with my friend Adrienne. She looked great. Not surprising, considering she lost 30 pounds. In fact, her own mother didn’t even recognize her!

Adrienne explained the ins-and-outs of nutrition: calories, carbs, fat, fiber… It was hard to process all of the data at the same time. I wanted to know one thing: which foods are most likely to help me get to my goal?

Simple, she explained, her program combined the nutrition info into one easy-to-understand compound metric: points. Every food has a point value, so you can easily pick between a turkey sandwich and a plate of pasta.

Paid search is a lot like nutrition: there’s an excess of data, but a big shortage in optimization. And like dieting, the complexity of the data leads to slow or, worse, inaccurate decisions.

You can reduce some of the complexity, and slim down your CPCs, with three useful compound metrics:

• Profit Per Impression (PPI)
• Weight Query Relevance
• Impression Share Opportunity

1. Profit Per Impression: Text Ad Testing’s Best Friend

Consider this text ad test of 3 ads. Let’s call them Ad 1, 2, and 3 from top to bottom.

Continue reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642306?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29

Online coupons have been around for quite some time, but within the past two years have grown exponentially in popularity and expanded beyond $.50 off your favorite cereal at the grocery store.

Receiving a daily deal on beauty products, food, services, or experiences are only a few clicks away now thanks to sites like Groupon or Living Social and now Facebook too. Traditional print coupons are so 2007.

Recently entering the daily deals industry, Facebook Deals were developed to “get groups of friends to discover your business” focusing less on the deal and more on the social component of bringing friends together to experience shared activities.

Still in its infancy, Facebook Deals looks to slightly transform the industry by adding the social component Groupon and Living Social attempt but fail to master.

Some are touting Facebook’s move as the end of Groupon and Living Social, but in reality the sites differ and can hold their own in the multi-million dollar industry. Take for instance their marketing styles, user demographics and prices just to name a few.

As a brand it’s important to examine exactly if your business can take advantage of daily deals and look to the future of the ‘social daily deals’ industry with the Facebooks, Groupons and Living Socials of the interwebs.

Create a Social Experience

It’s quite logical that Facebook would enter the industry in a way that incorporates their core mission: to “help connect and share with the people in your life.”

Continue reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642292?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29

A social platform like Twitter isn’t a sales driver; it’s a far subtler marketing tool.

The public doesn’t like to be harangued with sales messages when they’re socializing. They don’t want it in the pub and they don’t want it online.

But Twitter still has an immense value, even if it’s hard to measure. It’s superb for building brand loyalty, as long as you approach it in the right spirit.

Last year, a U.S. study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModeratefound that 79 percent of consumers who follow a brand on Twitter are more likely to recommend that brand compared to before they followed them.

It’s hard to put a price on that kind of word-of-mouth publicity and shows the value of having a popular Twitter identity.

So, here are my five top tips for building brand loyalty through Twitter.

Tweet Something Worthwhile

This is a basic tip, but it’s sadly often overlooked. What will your corporate Twitter account actually say and will it be anything that people want to read?

You’ll never follow a brand that relentlessly churns out marketing messages, even if you like the actual product or service. Who would?

Some brands also retweet every favorable mention of themselves, which is fine in small doses but gets a bit tiring if they are constantly bringing these tweets to your attention (price comparison websites are particularly bad for this).

Every message you post should provide some value for the reader, unless it is such good publicity that you simply have to share it.

On the occasions that you do use Twitter simply to blow your own trumpet, make sure it’s for something impressive — think major donations to good causes or winning industry awards.

Anything less and you just look a bit desperate and a bit corporate, which won’t result in brand loyalty.

Valuable tweets might include links to interesting, relevant articles and blog posts; research and statistics you’ve uncovered; expert commentary on industry events; discounts; offers of freebies; and relevant news.

• What’s most important: The two most important words here are value and relevance. Deliver both and your Twitter feed will be a success.

Encourage Staff to Tweet — With Guidance!

In addition to the official branded account, could your team tweet themselves? People like to feel they are connecting with other humans online and seeing the people behind a business can be highly effective in building a personal connection and securing brand loyalty.

This can be particularly valuable if you have a customer services team, as they are used to representing the brand and can then respond to feedback made through Twitter.

It also gives your team a platform for pro-active communication, which can be very powerful for building loyalty.

Continue reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/3642272?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28Search+Engine+Watch%29