Google Founders To Sell 10 Million Shares Over Five Years

According to an SEC filing late this afternoon, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin “each intend to sell approximately 5 million shares” — over a period of five years. This is not a reaction to any particular development in the market or perception of the outlook for Google; rather this is part of a plan to diversify their portfolios over time.

According to the filing:

These pre-arranged stock trading plans were adopted in order to allow Larry and Sergey to sell a portion of their Google stock over time as part of their respective long-term strategies for individual asset diversification and liquidity . . . Using these plans, they can gradually diversify their investment portfolios and can spread stock trades out over an extended period of time to reduce market impact . . .

Larry and Sergey currently hold approximately 57.7 million shares of Class B common stock, which represents approximately 18% of Google’s outstanding capital stock and approximately 59% of the voting power of Google’s outstanding capital stock. Under the terms of these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, and as a part of a five year diversification plan, Larry and Sergey each intend to sell approximately 5 million shares. If Larry and Sergey complete all the planned sales under these Rule 10b5-1 trading plans, they would continue to collectively own approximately 47.7 million shares, which would represent approximately 15% of Google’s outstanding capital stock and approximately 48% of the voting power of Google’s outstanding capital stock (assuming no other sales and conversions of Google capital stock occur).

Google has a dual class stock structure, consisting of Class A and Class B stock. Currently Brin and Page control about 59% of the Class B stock, but a minority of all outstanding shares. Class A shares have one vote each and Class B shares each control 10 votes.

At the end of the five year diversification term specified in the SEC filing, the two co-founders would own 47.7% of Class B shares. And together with CEO Eric Schmidt they would still own more than 50% of the Class B shares.

There have been unsuccessful efforts in the past to equalize the voting power of all shareholders.

One could argue that this dual-class stock structure enables Google to do things like stand up to the Chinese government, against the dominant logic of the market and potential objections of Class A shareholders (especially institutional shareholders). Indeed, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has criticized the move as “irrational.”

If sold today, the 10 million shares would be worth a little over $5.5 billion at Google’s current share price. source: http://searchengineland.com/

Google Real Time Search – 6 Minute Reaction Time for Earthquake

Google is changing, and becoming far more effective than ever before. With personal and universal search we have seen results and information more relevant to our searches. Now with the relatively new real-time search, we are starting to see just how it can have a positive impact on results, and also give us more reason to trust in social media.

This morning 10:09 am a small earthquake measuring 4.1 struck San Francisco. According to Stephen Shankland at cnet, Within 6 minutes Google had reacted and was displaying real time search results in the form of twitter updates relating to the earthquake for searchers in and around the San Francisco area. In Detroit, it took about another 6 minutes for results to appear.

This kind of fast reaction on Googles part not only helps to improve the relevance of the search results, but also is a strong point in favor of pursuing social media as part of your web marketing campaign. If you put up a twitter post about a very current event, there is a chance that you will appear in the top results in a very short period of time.

Being active in Twitter is just one piece of the puzzle, but an active account can help drive traffic to your website and can also indirectly result in overall improved rankings for your site. Something every website owner should consider.

source: http://seomanatee.com/

12 SEO Tips on Press Release Optimization

Press releases can be a very handy tool in the process of promoting a web site. While a well distributed press release can bring a bunch of links for your website, if written well, press releases can also rank in search results by themselves resulting in loads of referral traffic.

Internet marketing professionals and SEOs have all realized the potential of press release in optimizing their website and are trying to leverage this to maximum benefit.In this article I will list a few tips that will tell you how to write a search engine optimized press release.

a)Similar to the basic principle of SEO content writing, do a short keyword research to identify which are the keywords you want to target. Find a keyword that people are actually searching for and is a proper match/ description for your product/ service/ company. Use any keyword tool like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to find this.

b)Ensure you use your chosen keyword phrase in the headline of your press release. If your press release is relatively long, create a sub heading using the keyword phrase.

c)Use this keyword phrase in the content of the press release wherever applicable but make sure that you aren't forcibly stuffing your keyword in the content. A keyword stuffed press release would never meet its proper distribution potential thereby failing the basic purpose of the exercise. If you are not the best person when it comes to writing skills it is strongly advisable to take help of professional writers.For a good press release it is extremely important to maintain balance between the natural content appeal and the keyword insertion for optimization.

d)Use your website URL in the body of the press release. Make sure that the URL is inserted in proper URL form ( http://www.yourdomain.com ) and not just yourdomain.com

e)While Press releases are official communication and demands the mention of brand names, unless your brand is already a household name try to use short descriptive phrase for your product or service than just using the brand name. This would increase the chance of your press release showing up on search results when people search for those product descriptions. For example, instead of referring to your SEO software by its name "SEOUltima", if you would mention it as "SEO Software" or "SEO Software SEOUltima" that would help in optimizing the Press Release for SEO Software keyword.

f)Another easy way to increase the frequency of such descriptive phrases or brand names in your press release is to use them instead of pronouns like "it".

g)This should probably have been the first point in this list. Make sure that your Press release is actually newsworthy. That is one of the key factor that determines how well it gets syndicated.

h)Depending on available budget and importance of the release use a paid PR distribution service. Alternatively, there are various PR services that will distribute your news for free.

If you are choosing a free PR distribution service, first check if the service is indexed by popular news search engines. Check the coverage in places like Google News, Yahoo News.

i)Besides submitting to PR networks, put up the press release on your own site in its separate page and link to it from the home page.

j)Submit your press release to popular social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl etc

k)Search Google News for your target keywords and make a note of the sites that are already listed. Check if those sites would accept and publish your Press Release.

l)If you are publishing frequent press releases ( that helps ! ) make sure you have a RSS feed for your press release.