29 « July « 2009 « The Marion Group – Houston Interactive Agency

Yahoo! and Microsoft Hand in Hand: How this Changes SEO Strategies

Posted by admin in Search Engine Optimization on July 29, 2009

Microsoft and Yahoo! announced today (Wednesday, July 29th) that an agreement has been made to integrate Yahoo! Search engine technology with Microsoft’s new search engine (excuse me, “decision engine”) known as Bing.

The ten-year partnership will deal exclusively with search and search advertising. The two groups will apparently remain independent in certain sectors like news sites and electronic mail services

The partnership is intended to create a new “number 2” in an effort to strike a blow at Google (never really mentioned by name in Steve Ballmer’s video below), the behemoth of search and paid ad revenues.

Fickle Yahoo! has changed search partners before.

1995-Yahoo! directory first to “catalog the web”
1998-Yahoo! uses Alta-Vista and Inktomi for web search
2000-Yahoo! uses Google for web search
2004-Yahoo! kicks Google out, buys Inktomi and develops its own search engine
2009-Yahoo!and Microsoft agree to collaborate on a web search and ad partnership “Bing go!”

Because Marion follows standard SEO practices (cleverly executed) our rankings on Bing remain as strong as they were on MSN.com, if not just a little bit better. And instead of optimizing separately for Google, Yahoo and Bing, we only need to optimize for Google and Bing now.

b2b, Search Engine Optimization

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Decrease Foreign Email Spam

Posted by admin in Email on July 29, 2009

Have you noticed an increase in spam coming from China, Russia or another country that you shouldn’t be getting email from? Well, with just a few simple email setting changes in Outlook, you can reduce this junk mail significantly. Be sure to look at the extension to verify you are getting international spam – .ru, .cn, etc. Just follow these few simple steps to eliminate this problem.

First go to the Actions menu and select Junk Emails. You should then see Junk Email Options. From there, select the International tab and follow the instructions below.

Select Junk Email Options under the Action Menu in Outlook

Select the international extensions that are connected to your spam. Make sure you do not exclude any countries you may receive legitimate email from.

Blocked Top-Level Domain List
Choose the “Blocked Top-Level Domain List” button and click on the country extensions listed in the spam email address. Click OK when done.