A study from Shareaholic that Pinterest is now the 4th largest traffic source in the world.

Some interesting things to note:

• Since May, Pinterest traffic has more than doubled in size.
• Since January, Google, Yahoo and Bing organic traffic has decreased by 15.63% on average.

These are some interesting trends. While organic search engine traffic is still very important, social media has definitely risen and requires attention in any marketing efforts.

The Yahoo/Bing merger was announced a little more than a year ago. However, the actual integration of the services for PPC is just starting to be rolled out. With this merger, what does it mean for PPC advertising?

The Details

Bing and Yahoo combine to make up about 30% of the U.S. search market share, reaching about 155 million users. As a result of this merger, Yahoo will begin serving up Bing search results as well as using Microsoft adCenter as their PPC campaign management system.

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Introduction:

For the last few years, most developers and site designers have been aware of the increased risk of using complex URLs. A complex URL tends to look something like:

http://www.somewebsite.com/pages/search.asp?id=21f&c=9clr&y=true.

This URL is a problem for both search engine spiders and, in some cases, the user of the site . Complex, non-user friendly URLs, also known as dirty URLs, are very common throughout the internet. Dirty URLs pose an array of problems. The most common problems with dirty URLs are:

• they are hard to remember
• they are not SEO friendly
• they can be a security risk
• they can just be a problem for ease of usability

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Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines have come a long way in terms of indexing duplicate content. Although detected duplicate content doesn’t necessarily penalize your site in terms of how the search engines perceive the content, it can penalize your site by dividing users who access your site. Search engines will most likely still index your duplicate content, and thus, when a search is termed up, it could be directed towards any version of the duplicate content.

There are several ways of fixing duplicate content issues. We’ll create a scenario to determine how to fix it.

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ComScore recently released their list on the top 15 ad networks for 2009.

The total audience accounts for about 75% of the entire U.S. online population. As such, AOL Advertising still has a hold on about 91% of that audience. The largest growth came from Microsoft Media Network, which, perhaps, is the result of Microsoft’s launch of Bing.

Despite the growth of the major ad networks there appears to be a number of large web sites that are opting for their own solutions for ad networks. Mainly, CBS and ESPN web sites drop out of ad networks. It’s more profitable for larger web sites to do their own sales but smaller sites would still need the help of using an ad network. As such, ad networks are still experiencing a large growth in numbers and are projected to maintain that trend.