Holiday spending has been weakest in 17 years but TNS Retail Foward forecasts a 1.5% growth for the holiday Q4 in key retail areas. Online sales is expected to grow 9% to $42.5 billion during the holiday seasons compared to 19% in 2007.

Apparel retailers are expected to decline in 1.3%. Homegoods channels and Furniture/ home furnishing stores are expected to decline by 1%. Consumer electronic stores on the other hand is expected to grow at 4% partially helped by consumer conversion to digital TV signals. Mass retailers are also expected to show a 5.6% growth as higher food prices are expected to shift consumers to focus on value.

Holiday Shopping
Mediamark (MRI) is expecting 35% of adults (62.3 million) will begain holiday shopping before Thanksgiving while another 35.8% is expected to shopt between Thanksgiving and Dec 15th. 25.6% (45.3 Million) is expected to shopt from December 16 to December 23rd.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google has recently added a new feature to their webmaster tools that will give the source of broken links they find while crawling.  For more information, see the announcement here.

Google has long reported broken links in the webmaster tools, but you could not tell where they came from.  The new feature lets you see the source of these broken links, both within your site and from other external websites.  You can find the new information in the Diagnostics | Web Crawl section of Google webmaster tools, where they report “404 Not Found” errors.  If the list is long, you can download the report as a document to make it easier to use.

This gives a great opportunity to improve user experience and your SEO results.  Here are some tips on what to do  with this new information:

1.  First, fix any errors within your site, especially if there are large numbers.  This helps users avoid “404 not found” errors, and lets search engines find your real pages.  Also, if you had many errors, you can increase trust of the search engines in your site by fixing them, which can improve rankings.
2. For external broken links, see if you can have the source website fix the problem.  Otherwise, put in a HTTP 301 redirect that handles the broken link, redirecting to the correct URL (do not use JavaScript, meta refresh or HTTP 302 redirects, be sure to use a 301).  This will again help users, and also help your SEO by directing that inbound page rank to a real page, helping it rank better.  This is a bit like a free inbound link!
3. Look at how that link might have been a problem in the first place.  Are your URLs too long or complicated to copy?  Do you have complex query parameters to deal with?  Did you rename or delete pages without using a 301 redirect to handle retired URLs?  Are there errors in your bookmarking buttons and tags?  Think about what you can do to prevent broken links in the first place.

Google continues to add some great features to webmaster tools.  Yahoo and MSN have also been adding some great tools as well.  Make good use of the information they provide, and it will help your users and your SEO.

     John Erickson
     LeadQual

The MSN Live Cashback program is called “Search Perks” (www.getsearchperks.com) — which is usable only in Internet Explorer (sorry Firefox).

MSN Live’s new promotion rewards visitors that use Live Search with tickets redeemable for various prizes including airline miles, music downloads and even xBox accessories.

Here’s how Search Perks works:

• Get 500 tickets just by signing up and downloading the Perk Counter
• Start searching using Live Search at Live.com and MSN.com, or on Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger
• For every search (up to 25 per day), you’ll earn a ticket towards great prizes
• Stay tuned for additional ways to earn tickets once you join the promotion
• Redeem your tickets for prizes once the promotion ends on April 15, 2009

The deadline to register for MSN Live’s Search Perks is December 31st, 2008. This is just one of the many marketing attempts that are coming out of Redmond, WA. We have all seen the Seinfeld episodes that are targeted towards Apple, now Microsoft is trying to win search engine share by rewarding users with free gifts.

- Nicholas Abramovic

Nicholas has always found MSN Live to give accurate search results and is now excited to get rewarded for using MSN Live.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced the rebranding of IndexTools into Yahoo Web Analytics. It is currently in beta and only available as an enterprise product. IndexTool was acquired by Yahoo in April 2008. Yahoo immediately started to work on integrating the tool in a similar fashion to the well known Google Analytics. The service was made free with the distinct advantage of having data updated every few minutes.
(more…)

Up until recently, Google has recommended that webmasters build links to their sites, and to use directories.  They had these two bullets in the guidelines:

• Make sure that all the sites that should know about your pages are aware that your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

These used to be part of the webmast guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

With Google removing these, does that mean they do not want webmasters to build links, or that you should not use web directories to build links?  Does this mean that Yahoo directory, DMOZ and other authoritative directories are no longer trusted?

(more…)