Google Sitemaps for Video - Making your videos more searchable

It’s already on techmeme, but if you missed it, Google has launched a way for webmasters to let them know if you have video content on your website.

No longer waiting for google to figure out that you host your own video, or uploading your content to youtube etc just so that it appears on google’s video search result pages. It is now possible to simply tell google to crawl your video pages for indexing into video.google.com and possibly also universal search.

More on the google webmaster blog > 

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata

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e-retail has a lot of room for improvement, usability and customer serivce wise

Was checking my RSS feeds after almost a week today, and stumbled upon this eye-opener.

The Get Elastic blog posts about a study that was done on 300 major e-retailers on the basis various usability and customer support related factors. The results make you wonder that e-commerce could really have been much larger/more trusted/liked than it is already only if e-retailers would pay more attention to giving customers a ‘better than simply “good”‘ shopping experience.

A few of the study’s findings:

Enlarge Image Feature - used by 76% of sites

Estimated Delivery - 74% of sites

Gift Cards - used by 58%

Timely and Accurate E-Mail Support - 58% responded correctly within 24 hours

Free Shipping - 43%

Pre-Checkout Shipping Calculation - found on 42% of sites

In Stock Availability - used by 39% (Especially important over the holidays)

Poor Fonts - 38% had fonts that are difficult to read - either too small or not web-friendly

Multiple Image Views - 38% offered this feature

More Than 4 Steps in Checkout - 35% of sites

Customer Reviews - 33% of sites

In-Store Pick Up - 10% of sites that have local stores

Mulitple Payment Options - 10-20% offer one or more options like PayPal, Google Checkout, pay by check or Bill Me Later

More on the Get Elastic Blog

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Video Startup Ooyala Wins Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge

A few months ago, e-retail giant and web-services provider amazon announced that they would pay $100,000 in cash and offer investment in any startup that makes the best use of amazon’s web services in their business model.

The Result is here!

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

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Google puts product searches above ads this season

Just noticed this while searching for some products on google.

The universal search now shows results from google products (what used to be froogle) just above adwords ads.

Somehow, this way of displaying product search results makes them a lot more viewable than earlier when they were shown just above standard organic search results, This new format does take a lot of eyeballs away from paid advertisements. this is bad news for PPC affiliates and advertisers who use adwords to promote their products but haven’t uploaded their datafeeds to google base yet.

Blogged with Flock

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Google bans the usage adwords to sell links/google juice

In an effort to further curb the sales of links and pagerank for SEO, google has banned all adwords ads that are used to sell text link advertisements targeted towards selling a shortcut to better google rankings.

Before:

After:

this change in implementation is in accordance with Google’s existing AdWords and Webmaster guidelines. The AdWords guidelines stated “Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of … search engine spamming,” pointing to the webmaster guidelines for further definitions of unacceptable techniques… and the webmaster help pages state “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.”

[Via Google Blogoscoped]

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