The Buyer Group PR + SEO News

It was 4:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving eve and Florida Real Estate Attorney Roy Oppenheim was in his office regrouping for a long weekend. Meanwhile, Wall Street Journal reporter James Bob Hagarty was working on a story about homeowners who are creating their own bailouts, the coined name “strategic defaults.”

Hagarty searched the various Internet sites and came across some of Oppenheim’s past media coverage. The real estate reporter called Oppenheim and interviewed him about what a homeowner should know before they stop paying the mortgage: a tough decision and one that Oppenheim helps his clients make each day.

It’s a fact: 91% of journalists use standard search to fulfill a component of their job whether researching a story or locating a subject matter expert. Traditional PR efforts combined with savvy optimization will increase your on-line visibility.

Read the full story Debtor’s Dilemma: Pay the Mortgage or Walk Away on the Oppenheim Law News Room or in today’s Wall Street Journal on page A22.

Follow @JamesRHagarty on Twitter for more excellent reporting from The Wall Street Journal

http://twitter.com/JamesRHagerty

The battle for online market share is continuing to intensify as Microsoft opens a can of competition at the established search engine powerhouse, Google.

Microsoft’s latest attempt to thrust its newly released Bing.com into the fray has them teaming with Yahoo.  Under the partnership, Yahoo is abandoning its own search technology in favor of the newly developed Bing algorithms.

According to Mashable.com, a partnership with Yahoo provides Microsoft the scale and advertising opportunities needed to turn Bing into an actual competitor of Google, at least in the short-term.  From Yahoo’s perspective, this deal seems to suggest the site will never again be a major player in the search market.

At The Buyer Group, we believe that as long as Google continues to provide quality search and services, loyalty to the site will prevail, leaving Bing with little more than a temporary blip on the market share radar.