Search Engine News
Host | 15 May 2004 | Comments Off
Search Engine News
Google gets ready for IPO
In the last year there has been a lot of speculation about search engine giant Google launching an IPO (initial public offering). This talk has been spreading like wildfire throughout Wall Street, and the financial industry over the course of the last year, mostly due to Wall
Street’s hopes that this single event could re-invigorate the tech sector. While this may be wishful thinking, it’s not too far off the reality that Google’s IPO will be one of the biggest events since the tech bubble burst in 2000.
Google was started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Both were graduate students at Stanford at the time. Current estimates are that Larry and Sergey own roughly one third of Google, which is expected to be worth between $15 billion and $25 billion after their stock market debut.
When the rumor of Google’s IPO was started about a year ago, Google denied going public, and said they had no plans to in the future.
This may or may not have been true, but now they don’t really have a choice. It appears that due to a 70 year old Securities and
Exchange Commission regulation, any privately held company with more than 500 shareholders must open their books within 120 days of the end of the fiscal year in which they crossed the reporting threshold. Google, who now has around 1,000 employees, has given some sort of stock option to almost every employee, and has now crossed that threshold. This doesn’t mean they must go public now, but it does mean that because of the rumors floating around the past year, the timing is impeccable.
On April 23 2004, CNN reported that Google’s IPO announcement was to come within days. No announcement has been issued yet, but it appears that it is really going to happen soon. The IPO is estimated to bring a cash windfall of around $2-4 billion to Google and spread about $100 million worth of fees around Wall Street. Google has selected Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston to handle the offering, which will make Larry and Sergey Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires.
Is the meta keyword tag (more commonly meta-tag) dead? In the last year or two, lots of speculation has risen regarding the meta keyword tag and how important the search engines think it is. It is considered common knowledge now that the keyword meta tag isn’t being used by search engines, and that in most cases, you can leave this meta tag out of your web pages without hurting your chances for a high ranking. While this may be true in some aspect, it’s not completely true.
New research is suggesting that now the search engines are in fact still reading the keyword metatag. Also, this new research is showing that many top ranking pages at Google and Yahoo have a correctly formatted keyword metatag, while others that are ranking lower may not have a correctly formatted keyword tag. Additionally, those sites that are using the keyword tag are coming up in search results higher than those sites not using keyword tags at all.
This news is certainly exciting, but we feel it’s just a small part of how the search engines are ranking sites. You’re certainly not going to get to the top of the listings on a keyword tag if your site has poor link popularity. However, if all of the other search engine optimization elements are being used on your site, consider using the keyword tag more effectively. It might just give your site that extra little push to the top.
