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We are running WordPress 3.3.1 and despite what many supposed "security experts" claim letting you know what version we are running does not make us less secure.Did We Make a Mistake?
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Monthly Archives: April 2009
Click Fraud Rate Dropped Significantly in First Quarter
Click Forensics today reported that the overall industry average click fraud rate for pay per click (PPC) advertising was 13.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009, down from 17.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 16.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008. The lowest rate in the past four quarters was 16 percent, in the third quarter of 2009. The president of Click Forensics, Tom Cuthbert, said that the drop in click fraud appears to be due to “the drop in keyword Cost Per Clicks (CPCs) and the progress Yahoo! and Google made blocking click fraud from botnet sources”. Click Forensics reported seeing an increase in click fraud from malicious JavaScript programs in the first quarter, with ad networks being especially vulnerable to attacks. Click Forensics gathers it’s data from online advertising campaigns for both large and small companies from both major search providers and over 300 ad networks.
Posted in Online Advertising
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Internet Explorer 8 Market Share Reaches 4.63 Percent a Month After Release
A month after Internet Explorer 8’s release it had a market share of 4.63 percent of worldwide web browser share according to Net Applications. This was an increase of 3.18 percent of market share from the 1.45 percent Internet Explorer 8 had on release date of March 19. Those number include users using pre-release versions of Internet Explorer 8, the day before the finalized version was released it already had market share of 1.34 percent. Internet Explorer 8 now has a larger market share than either Google’s Chrome or Opera and over half Apple’s Safari had in the month of March. Chrome had a market share of 1.23 percent, Opera had .70 percent, and Safari had 8.23 percent. In March Internet Explorer had a total market share of 66.82 percent, with Internet Explorer 6 having a market share of18.36 percent and Internet Explorer 7 having 46.54 percent.
Posted in Microsoft, Web Browsers
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Google Expands Use of Sitelinks In Search Results
Google has introduced an expansion of sitelinks, which brings the possibility of a more limited version of sitelinks being displayed for multiple results on a search results page. Sitelinks are links to additional pages on a website that are shown underneath a result from that website. The decision whether to show sitelinks for a given query and what links to show is determined algorithmically. In a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog announcing the expansion, Google explains that the purpose of sitelinks is to “enable users to jump directly to important parts of a site, which is often useful for large, complex websites” and to give “users an overview of a website’s content by highlighting some of the popular parts of the site.”
Originally, sitelinks were only shown for the first result of a search with three to eight links shown in two columns. If your search for Microsoft you can see example of this along with a search box, for searching within the given website, that is sometimes shown under the sitelinks. The expansion introduces one-line sitelinks, which show up to four links to other pages on the website. The one-line sitelinks can show up for multiple results, including the first result.
In the post Google also announced changes in the ability for websites to block pages from their websites, through Google’s Webmasters Tools, from being shown as sitelinks. Google will be “speeding up our response time” in blocking pages and expanding the blocking, which is currently limited to blocking pages shown as sitelinks for a website’s homepage, to any page on a website that displays sitelinks.
Posted in Google, Search Engines
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Yahoo Increases Share of US Search-Ad Revenue in Q1
Yahoo increased it share of US search-ad revenue to 19.3 in the first quarter of 2009, up 1 percent from the year ago period, according to search marketing firm Efficient Frontier. From the year ago period, Google dropped .9 percent to 72.3 percent and Microsoft dropped 1 percent to 3.5 percent. Google had a click-through rate (CTR) of 2.38 and cost per click (CPC) of 54 cents in the first quarter of 2009, Yahoo CTR of 1.16 and CPC of 42 cents, and Microsoft CTR of 2.19 and CPC of 52 cents. The data is based a subset of Efficient Frontier clients and is comprised of over 84 billion impressions and 785 million clicks.
Posted in Google, Microsoft, Online Advertising, Search Engines, Yahoo
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Microsoft Announces Plan for Roll Out of Internet Explorer 8
Microsoft today announced its plan to roll out Internet Explorer 8 to Microsoft’s Windows Update and Automatic Update software update services. According Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 will begin to show up in the update services “on or about the third week of April” and the show up for “a narrow audience and expand over time to the entire user base.” For users who update via the Automatic Update service the update will not be automatically installed, instead they will see a screen that will ask them if they wish to update to the new version. When Internet Explorer 8 was released on March 19 it was only made available for download on the Internet Explorer website. According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer 8′s market share had reached 4.36 percent yesterday; up from 1.45 percent on the day finalized version was released.
Posted in Microsoft, Web Browsers
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Google’s U.S. Search Share Reaches New High and Yahoo’s Reaches New Low
Nielsen Online today released its rankings of U.S. search share for March (PDF), with overall search increasing 16.7 percent year over year to 9.5 billion searches. Google had a year over year increase of 27.6 percent and received 64.2 percent of searches. Google’s had it highest percentage of searches ever, surpassing November of last year when it received 64.1 percent. Yahoo had a year over year increase of 1.7 percent and received 15.8 percent of searches. Yahoo’s percentage of searches was lower that 16 percent for the first time in the last two years and was 6.1 percentage points lower than it highest percentage in the last two years. Microsoft had a year over year increase of 0.3 percent and received 10.3 percent of searches.
Posted in Google, Microsoft, Search Engines, Yahoo
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