Atlanta Web Design – DoubleDome Web Technologies

NEW YORK (Fortune) — Facebook might have a larger audience than the population of Brazil (200 million users vs. 191 million citizens), but the site doesn’t yet have a viable business model. Twitter is wildly popular but it loses money. Could the codgers at software giant Microsoft (a Facebook investor) be the guys who end up figuring out how to make money on social networks?

The company on Wednesday will begin testing a new social-networking platform called Microsoft Vine, and chief strategist Craig Mundie tells Fortune the company is planning on pursuing a subscription-based model instead of trying to support the platform only with advertising. Vine’s other twist: It plans to target public safety officials and concerned citizens seeking emergency information.

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Google improves its ranking algorithm on an ongoing basis. During the last weeks, Google changed three things on the result pages that are visible to all Google users.

1. Google has increased the snippet length.

Google now shows an extended snippet for queries that consist of three or more keywords. The idea behind this change is that these multi-word queries are very targeted and complex. The usual short snippet might not contain enough information.

2. Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the results

When you search for a keyword, Google will display related searches at the bottom (and sometimes at the top) of the search results.

For example, if you search for the keyword “principles of physics”, Google will suggest “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” as related terms that could help you find what you need.

3. Google now shows local results based on IP addresses

Search Google for the keyword “pizza” and you’ll see local results in the middle of the search results. These local results are delivered based on the IP address of the searcher. That means that you will get different results than people in another city.

Google tries to find a relation between the words that are used to link to your site and the content of your website. If many websites link to your website with the word “tomatoes” then Google’s algorithm will come to the conclusion that your website should be listed in the search results for the keyword “tomatoes”.

The keywords in the links to a website have been so important for Google that people managed to get websites to the top of Google’s search results for very obscure keywords. For example, some people started a scheme in which they asked their friends to link to the official website of George W. Bush with the keyword “miserable failure”.

The result was that George W. Bush’s website was #1 on Google for that keyword. In the meantime, Google has learned to deal with these so-called Google bombs and it’s not as easy to manipulate the results with the links as it has been.

A new study by the nonprofit Online Trust Alliance suggests that marketers are doing too little to protect the reputation of their brands online, with only 37% of Fortune 500 companies taking robust security measures to safeguard against cyber-fraud. And phishing — fake e-mails often sent under the guise of well-known, trusted brands, usually to obtain credit-card numbers — is on the rise.

A Gartner study released last week said in the 12 months ended September 2008, more than 5 million U.S. consumers — 40% more than in the same period a year ago — lost money to phishing attacks. These well-publicized e-mail scams have made consumers wary of opening commercial e-mails. And perhaps no one feels the pain more than financial services companies, a prime target of scammers.

The OTA study said the overwhelming majority of Fortune 500 brands, including huge marketers such as AT&T, Procter & Gamble, Sears and MetLife, have not taken the two key steps to reinforcing online security: implementing website-security certificates and authenticate e-mails sent from their corporate domains.

What does that mean? E-mail authentication means a marketer provides information — digital signatures, IP addresses or domain names from which legitimate e-mails will come — to the ISPs, such as Earthlink or Comcast, or e-mail vendors, such as Yahoo or AOL, that helps them determine that this is truly from the company it claims be from. For example, XYZ company can declare to the ISP that it only sends e-mails from the domain www.bigbookseller.com. Thus, if the ISP sees e-mails purporting to come from XYZ but that are sent from any other domain, it should block them.

OTA Chairman Craig Spiezle said third-party e-mail marketers are adopting authentication at a rate of 85%, but brands themselves are not protecting their corporate domain names. That means third-party vendors sending e-mails on their client’s behalf often authenticate the domain they have set up to control the campaign. For example, an e-mail marketer sending promotional e-mails on behalf of XYZ might use the authenticated e.bigbookseller.com domain, but bigbookseller.com itself is not authenticated. Thus, it becomes easy for someone to forge e-mail that appears to be coming from bigbookseller.com.

During the first quarter of 2009, the average volume of paid search clicks was down 9% compared with Q1 2008, according to new research from NetElixir Inc., an online advertising management firm. At the same time, the average cost per click was down 7% year over year, the research shows.

The average click-through rate was up 7.5% in first quarter of 2009 versus Q1 2008, and the average search ad conversion rate was up 5%, NetElixir reports.