NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

I’ve been catching up on my rss feeds this weekend and I’ve come across a few articles worth reading:

Price Comparison RIP

Andy Beal tells us that Google is getting into the finance business by offering mortgage quotes….

It appears that LendingTree, a leading online mortgage quote provider, has taken umbrage with the company, Mortech, that provides some of the power behind LendingTree’s service. As a result, Google gets to play as well.

“LendingTree recently learned that Google imminently plans to launch a loan aggregation service in late August or early September of this year that would compete with LendingTree,” the complaint says. “Lending Tree has also learned that Mortech intends to make its pricing engine services available for use with Google’s new service and will send information related to mortgage loan offers to be displayed to consumer on Google’s Web site.”

This is MASSIVE news…for some time I have been saying its only a matter of time before Google point their technology at other profitable areas where search technology can be used to great effect…Price comparison. This  is made for Google and they obviously feel finance is a good place to begin.

So if you have a business that aggregates information where you have a slice of commission for a sale generated, then watch out.

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Google release data to tell us that ad positions don’t affect conversion. So its a case of prominence giving more volume and your landing pages giving the extra performance. My take away: take more care over your landing pages.

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The definitive SEO checklist. It’s a massive SEO compendium created by  Seomoz. They say:

The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.

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I thought this comscore data might interest you…Its the global and international share of search. Global = everything. International = Everything except the US. And yes the big G is the gorilla.