Google will Change Ranking Algorithm

Google will make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.
Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.

But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.

Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast. A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”
The freshness or buzzy nature of a query also aided in this pursuit, and cybercriminals merely have to follow Google Trends and Google News to know which keywords and phrases to target.

Fights In The Google Monopoly Debate Miss Key Points

Fights In The Google Monopoly Debate Miss Key Points

Keywords are the most important to the Internet Marketing?

Why should you care about your Keywords when you do your Internet Marketing?

Keywords are essential to your online success. You must get your keywords right or it's game over before you even get started. This is because keywords are the most important element of your online marketíng. It can't be emphasized enough, especially to beginning online webmasters or marketers, choosing the right profitable keywords will largely determine whether or not you succeed with your online endeavors.

What are Keywords?
Keywords are the words or phrases someone types into a search engine to find what they're looking for on the web. Some keywords or phrases are valuable/profitable, while others are virtually worthless. Profitable keywords are the ones that convert into a sale, a lead or potential client for your company or product. These are the words someone is searching in order to buy a product. Someone searching for "iPhone from Appl" is probably in the market to buy a iPhone and could turn out to be very profitable for the right website or business.

Profitable keywords are the ones where the searcher is in the right "mind-set" or frame of mind to buy what they're searching for on the web. Tailor your marketing online to target these profitable keywords and it can turn into a success.
So what's the whole process for finding or choosing profitable keywords to use in your marketing? Lets look at some ways to proceed:

Number of Keyword Searches?
What you need to do is to find out how many searches are made for your chosen keywords each month. Simply use WordTracker or a site like SEOBook. These will give you a preliminary number of searches made each month for your keyword. Highly popular, well-searched keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches each month will be extremely hard to rank for because you will have stiff competition from major companies with limitless resources.
You have to pick less popular keywords that get only a couple of hundred of searches each day because your chances of getting on the first page greatly increases. But don't get fixated on the number of searches, some keyword phrases that only get four or five searches daily, can still be very profitable.
For serious keyword research in a particular niche market You cøuld use Brad Callen's Keyword Elite which is professionally designed software that makes all your keyword research so much easier. But there are plenty of free keyword tools you can use. One handy keyword tool is Google Adwords external suggestion tool which will help you find valuable keywords.

Commercial Intent of Keywords?
But how do you know if a keyword is profitable? One convenient tool is from MSN which helps you with "Detecting Online Commercial Intention" of keywords. Just type in a keyword and it will give you a percentage or probability your keyword query has commercial benefit or intent.

Conversion Rate of Keywords?
Once you have your chosen keywords in place, next you want to have a landing page that converts those keywords or traffic from those keywords into buyers or leads for your online business. This is another crucial element of your online marketíng - you must have a landing page or content/site that converts into a sale or you obviously won't make any revenue.
Keep in mind, if you're into affiliate marketing, you main goal is not to sell but to "pre-sell" your products or services. One effective way I have found to do this is to give potential customers/clients valuable information they can use in making their final purchasing choice. Comparison sites do well, as do review sites, top ten sites... potential customers use the Internet and keywords to not only find products but more so, to find information on those products. Your goal should be to provide this valuable information to make their task a little bit easier for them and they will reward you with a sale.

Long-Tail Keywords?
Long-Tail keywords are simply that: long three or four word phrases that searchers use to find what they're looking for on the web. Because they are highly specific, long-tail keywords have proven to have better conversion rates than general keywords. This is also just common sense, someone searching for a "2005 ford mustang convertible" may just be in the right mind-set to buy such a vehicle; as compared to someone searching for a more general keyword phrase such as "sports cars."
Study your website traffic logs religiously to find long-tail keywords that turn into a sale. Target these long-tail keywords in your marketing. Even buy PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in the three major search engines - Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing and MicroSoft AdCenter - for these valuable/profitable keywords.
And build higher rankings in organic search for these long-tail keyword phrases. It's really not that difficult for long phrases, especially if they're related to your site; many times you can reach the top spot in a matter of days, especially in Google.

How to Rank High for Your Chosen Profitable Keywords?
Of course, the million dollar question is: HOW do you rank in the top spot for your chosen keywords? I believe the key to ranking high in the search engines (especially Google) is to be persistent in building your rankings for your keywords. Take a long-term view or approach, sometimes it may take months, even years, to rank in the top Five for your highly competitive keywords.
The best strategy is to "stick to it" and keep building relevant links to your keyword landing page. Create related blogs with valuable content linking back to your keywords. Write keyword related articles and distribute them all over the web. Create Google Alerts for your keywords and then place comments/links in the newly formed pages on the web that Google is indexing.
Be pro-active, download the SEOQuake toolbar and find your main keyword competitors. Check out their links and then go out and get the same links. Write better, higher quality content than your main competitors because Google always rewards great content. Plus, use the free Addthis.com button and let your visitors bookmark your great content in all the social bookmark sites and build your keyword links for you.
Do keyworded Press Releases with your embedded links and spread them all over the web. Get these Press Releases into Google news and other important places on the web. PRWeb.com is really a great place for your press releases since you can embed your keywords in your links.
If you can try to get your most important keywords in your domain name. Many SEO experts argue the merits of this but from my own experience and marketing - it is much easier to rank high for your keywords if you have them in the domain name. Again, it is just common sense, if you have your main keyword in the domain, this keyword is obviously telling the search engines this is what your site is all about. I have even bought domains and created sites specifically around certain keywords just to rank high.
Always remember, you have to be persistent, I have been fighting some keyword battles for over four or five years! For really profitable keywords, it can be a constant struggle to remain on the first page, but the trick is not to give up, just keep fighting away at your competitors. Persistence usually pays off in the end and those profitable keywords will have your links in the top spot. Make ranking high for those profitable keywords your number one marketing strategy. Concentrate all your marketing efforts towards getting plenty of quality traffic for those keywords and you will succeed online

Software Pirates Tell Their Stories in BSA Campaign by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

Software Pirates Tell Their Stories in BSA Campaign by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

What does a software pirate look like? Anyone. And that's the new message of the Business Software Alliance, which asked five convicted software pirates to tell their stories.

Google's Schmidt Talks Privacy, Internet Domination by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

Google's Schmidt Talks Privacy, Internet Domination by PC Magazine: Yahoo! Tech

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website | How-To | Smashing Magazine

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website | How-To | Smashing Magazine

What to do when your CMS system is ready for launch. Check some more important tasks...

New feature from Linkedin.

LinkedIn launched a new feature that would allow members of groups to share and discuss news articles. Last week, the professional social network offered group owners and managers another way to provide relevant news to their group by way of sharing feeds.

Managers can now create customs news feeds by adding an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or just a Web site URL.
According to a recent blog post, the idea is to give group members a "comprehensive news digest" on LinkedIn that will potentially help them discover new blogs and sources.
While at first glance the idea of incorporating feeds into the professional networking service doesn't seem particularly interesting - many other networks have already enabled this sharing and communicating option, it may just be a great way to introduce feeds to a more mainstream market.
Sites like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc., have always relied on participation from a tech savvy audience; those who are already familiar with feeds, and who for the most part have already created their own customized feeds, so that the content, more than the technology is the most important component.
LinkedIn however is a little different. Its audience doesn't comprise solely of the tech or Web savvy; many are just ordinary folk wanting to find other like minded folk for professional purposes. With this new feature, it just may be that LinkedIn will bring the feed to the masses.

SEO is Becoming More Important In Long Terms

It's a small business owner's dream to be the first result in Google when someone types in a word like "shoes." The resulting traffic stats and sales numbers would be incredible. However, it seems that small businesses might do much better by optimizing for queries involving more than one word.

Cost and feasibility need to be considered, of course - it's a rare small business that can pay for a site capable of competing with those owned by big corporations. But there's more to the situation than that.
It's in the land of three-, four-, and five-word searches that more and more people are spending their time, and together, 45.4 percent of the searches Hitwise has tracked so far this year fall into these categories.

Focusing your search engine optimization efforts on longer queries is something to think about instead of straining to create interesting one-word product names, then. Heck, attain a high ranking now, and maybe you'll even have a hold on it when the Reeboks of the world branch out.

SEO is Becoming More Important In Long Terms

It's a small business owner's dream to be the first result in Google when someone types in a word like "shoes." The resulting traffic stats and sales numbers would be incredible. However, it seems that small businesses might do much better by optimizing for queries involving more than one word.

Cost and feasibility need to be considered, of course - it's a rare small business that can pay for a site capable of competing with those owned by big corporations. But there's more to the situation than that.
It's in the land of three-, four-, and five-word searches that more and more people are spending their time, and together, 45.4 percent of the searches Hitwise has tracked so far this year fall into these categories.

Focusing your search engine optimization efforts on longer queries is something to think about instead of straining to create interesting one-word product names, then. Heck, attain a high ranking now, and maybe you'll even have a hold on it when the Reeboks of the world branch out.

Google Offers A Peek Into Its Internal Eye-Tracking Studies

Google Offers A Peek Into Its Internal Eye-Tracking Studies

There’s an interesting post today on the Official Google Blog that gives a glimpse inside the company’s usability and eye-tracking studies — tests that help Google determine what their search results pages should look like.

Travel companies are going for Twitter.

Hotels, airlines, airports and other travel companies are joining the Twitter community, to pitch services, update travel conditions and respond directly to the individual needs of customers. They're finding the mobile nature of the technology is ideal for talking to travelers. Read More..

PPC marketing in a down Economy

The economy’s downturn has finally reached the online advertising world.

When you stop marketing, you lose touch with your clients. You stop understanding what is important to your consumer base. Many believe that customer service and marketing is more important in a recession than at any other time. If you lose touch with our client base, how can you see the trends your clients are facing? Red More....

Google and Niche Services

Google and Niche Services: "Google continues to end projects, the most recent one being AdWords for Print. The blog post that explains the decision shows the big picture at Google:"

Microsoft and their missed opportunities With paid search.

Microsoft Bid to Beat Google Builds on a History of Misses from the Wall Street Journal has a very detailed look at some of the mistakes Microsoft made early on in the paid search space. The piece goes through the failure of Microsoft’s original Keyword ad platform, named bCentral Keywords, which was discontinued in early 2000. It then discusses the fact that they did not purchase Overture, which Yahoo acquired in 2003. Followed by the failed attempts at buying Yahoo this past year.

we all know Microsoft has made many mistakes in the past with search opportunities. But the most interesting pieces of the article is that Ballmer still wants the deal with Yahoo. It is also very interesting to see that Microsoft’s new search ad platform, adCenter, was code named “Moonshot.” Many advertisers love the feature set within adCenter, so the technology is not the reason adCenter is not competing. As Andrew Goodman notes, it is about market share. Advertisers go where the customers are and the customers are at Google, not Microsoft.

Google is testing new AdWords budget option

Google have been offering selected clients a new AdWords budgeting option called "Timeframe". This allows advertisers to choose a monthly budgeting option which allocates budgets across a calendar month according to traffic demands. The monthly budgeting option has only been made available to selected advertisers during a beta testing period.

Most advertisers would be familiar with how daily budgets work, where a set spending limit is applied each day. One of the shortfalls of this approach means that on lower traffic days, you might have some unused budget leftover that could have been used on higher traffic days.

Monthly budgeting eliminates this issue by automatically adjusting your budget each day to match traffic demands. From the AdWords Help Center:

With a monthly budget, Google will adjust your budget automatically each day to meet traffic demand while still respecting your budget for the calendar month. If you've seen this on your AdWords account, let us know what you think!

Google Releases Top Tactics for difficult Times

As we continue to hear news about an economic recession, the good folks at Google have decided to help you out.

They have recently announced the release of the "Top Tactics for Tough Times" centered around making the most of Google Adwords.

Here are the Google AdWords experts' top recommendations for making the most out of Adwords.

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings.
2. Use value-related keywords
3. Make sure your ad groups are targeted and relevant
4. Do not waste money on irrelevant clicks
5. Make it easy for customers to buy
6. Focus your money on your high performers.

The article goes into more details on these points, so if you would like to read more, then check it out here.



http://www.google.com/adwords/tactics2008/

Inside AdWords: Our Top 10 for 2008

Inside AdWords: Google's Top 10 for 2008

Predictions for 2009

Each year, the blogosphere is flooded with predictions for the next. It’s time to look into 2009 for one of the most exciting, and unpredictable, companies in existence — Google.

Google Apps will continue to gain momentum in the Enterprise
The longer the economy stays bad, the more attractive Google Apps begins to look for businesses that currently license Microsoft products. It costs an incredible amount of money to legally run things like Microsoft Exchange and Office in-house. Google’s Enterprise business will grow at Microsoft’s expense this coming year.

Google Chrome makes deal with OEM’s, and snags a significant chunk of the browser market
It would be almost impossible for Google to dethrone Internet Explorer in 2009 (or even Firefox for that matter). Google will, however, make a deal with OEM’s to have Google Chrome installed, and set as the “default” browser on new computers. If this happens, it will have a significant impact on Chrome usage in 2009. We could see Google snag as much as 10 to 15 percent of the browser market in the coming year.

GOOG will gain some of the ground it lost on wall street
Overall, this was a terrible year for Google — just as it was with almost every other company because of the economy. As investors become more comfortable with Google’s dominant position, and the need for companies to keep their online marketing budgets relatively static, the share price should close in the green for 2009 (but of course, if I could accurately predict this type of thing, I’d probably be on a beach somewhere, so take it with a grain of salt).

Predictions for Google's 2009

Predictions for Google's 2009

Google Hot Trends, Christmas Edition 2008

Google Hot Trends, Christmas Edition 2008

A New Redesign of Google Reader

Google Reader has just launched a major redesign to its interface, addressing many of the top concerns of users of the popular RSS reader.
In addition to simply looking way more clean and inviting, Google has introduced more collapsible navigation options, a new section for friends, additional feed bundles, and perhaps most welcoming to power users: the option to hide those intimidating unread items counts, which can quickly swell to hundreds or the dreaded “1,000+” when one spends more than a few hours away from the service.
The “hide” options are handled on a per subscription basis, creating a lot of flexibility in terms of deciding how overwhelmed you want to feel inside of Google Reader. When there are new items to see, the links will still be bold, but the number will not show.

The Google Reader team has a full explanation of the changes available on their blog.

Google’s New PPC Keyword Tool

The tool helps AdWords advertisers identify new keyword opportunities that aren’t currently being used in their AdWords ad campaigns.

Based on the URL and initial keywords you enter, the Search-Based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas that are relevant and specific to your website. I’ve only been playing around with it for a few days, but it’s already helped me pinpoint some keywords I’ve been overlooking in our PPC campaigns.
Two lists of keywords are generated when you enter your details. The first one is a list of keywords related to your page, meaning keywords that Google has extracted from your page copy. The second list relates to the specific search words and phrases that you entered in the search field.

For each list, the tool displays the following:

The average amount of traffic a search term receives each month on Google.com (and other Google search properties, such as google.co.uk)

The approximate amount of competition you face for ad placement on these queries
A suggested bid amount for the keyword/s that may place your ad in the top three spots of the page

The frequency with which an ad for your website appeared for a given query
The frequency with which your ad appeared in the first page of search results for a given query

The page on your website that best matched the keyword suggestion (if applicable)
The tool is better than prior versions of both the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, for two major reasons:

1) The bid suggestions give you an instant ballpark cost of adding keywords to your campaign based on actual competitor bids and you can pick, choose and export the ones you like into an Excel spreadsheet from the main report area. This time-saving functionality has been sorely missing from other PPC keyword tools.

2) By displaying the pages on your site that best match the search queries, the tool helps you choose the best landing pages for your ads without tiresome allocation by hand.

Linkedins Search Platform

Suggestive Search - When you type into the search box, a list of suggested names from your contacts pops up. You can select one of the names without having to type in the whole thing. I think this might come in handy when you're having a hard time remembering a name. Maybe you remember the first letter or the first name, but the rest of it just isn't coming to you - this can help.

Streamlined Search Results - LinkedIn changed the design to make it easier to scan the results. They also added photos. Results can be sorted by relevance, which includes the social graph, or by relationship, relationship + recommendations, and keyword.

Customizable Views Users can determine what info they want returned in their search results. Just click the "Views" drop down menu (next to the "Sort" drop down menu at the top of the results). You can decide whether you want to view headlines, photos, locations and more of the people returned in a search.

Take Action Straight from the Search Results When you mouse over a result, you'll notice links that let you take action. You can send InMail, get introduced (through a common contact), or add that person to your network.

Modify Your Search On the right hand side of the results, you'll notice a form where you can type in additional information to narrow your search down and pinpoint it to more exact specifications. You can search by name, job title, company location, and school.

Save Your Search If you want to return to the results, you can save your search. This is a good idea if you've modified your search or customized your view.

Inside AdWords: Google TV Ads program targeting enhancements

Inside AdWords: Google TV Ads program targeting enhancements

Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide

Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide

A new feature that allows you to move and comment on search results — has been out for less than a day, and it’s amazing to see how much confusion (as well as commentary) there is already developing. So below, some clarification on how it works, opportunities search marketers should consider, some privacy issues and ideas for improving it.

It allows you to move a listing higher in the search results, or move a listing lower in the results or delete a listing altogether. You can also comment about search results you see, and others can view your comments.

Google’s Relase New Search-Based Keyword Tool and Tells You What Keywords You’re Missing.

Google released a new keyword tool tonight, named the Search-Based Keyword Tool. This tool goes beyond what the other Google tools provide and tells you what keywords you are currently missing out on based on search query data from your site’s content.



Beyond the advertisers point of view, you can use this as a nice competitive analysis tool. You can see data about which keywords are relevant to any site on the Internet — so, if you are getting into a new line of business and want keyword data, just plug in the site’s domain and click go.

Google Analytics Blog: Want to track Adobe Flash? Now you can!

Google Analytics Blog: Want to track Adobe Flash? Now you can!

On Demand indexing

Now you can ensure your new pages or updated content is indexed by Google with 24 hours.

Well Google's new on-demand indexing service offers site owners just that. Via your Google Webmaster area, you can request that Google index new pages or content on your site - which will be scheduled for indexing within 24 hours.


The catch: The service is only available to site owners who use Google Site Search.

It makes sense that if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you want to be confident that all your content is available. On-demand indexing has been created to ensure Google Site Search users have confidence that searchers will find all their newest content.

Anyone with a website can take advantage of on-demand indexing by signing up to Google Site Search, even if you don't plan on using the search facility. Find out more about Google Site Search

Google AdPlanner now for everyone.

Google Ad Planner is available to anyone with a Google account, and the system has been given some useful improvements.

So what is Google Ad Planner? According to the original release post back in June, Ad Planner is:-
"a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit."

There are three key enhancements to the service:

1. Improved Audience Definitions:
Define your audience by likeliness to search using particular keywords and drill down by state / metro geographical levels.

2. New Site Ranking Methods
Rank sites based their likelihood to attract your desired audience, the sites’ popularity or a mix of both.

3. Interactive Media Plan Analysis
A new interactive bubble chart allows you to compare sites in your media plan by demographics, frequency, traffic, and unique visitors.

If you're looking to expand your campaign, or checking that you're maximizing your potential coverage, this could be a very handy tool. It's especially useful that Ad Planner includes sites outside Google's content network which means you get a healthy view of the available online ad inventory.

Google Updates Site Search
Google has introduced some new functionality to its Site Search product, which allows customers to search within your own site. The feature that everyone is talking about is the ability to add pages on-demand to be indexed by site search, so customers have access to these new pages as soon as they're ready.

In this world, that is full of all kinds of hustle and bustle, people demand speed! It was the game of yesterday years, when people used to wait for hours to get the things done. Now everything is instant! Google has made everything look so simple for us. Everything is available at our fingertips.
Google is there to answer our questions, it is there to provide us with minute directions and no matter what. You name it, and it has it!
On-Demand Indexing ensures that site visitors have access to a site's freshest content, and that businesses have the flexibility to share news, product releases and promotions as they happen.




According to the Google Press Center
"With On-Demand Indexing:
• Site owners get an "Index Now" button to quickly and easily update their site search results with new and updated content.
• New pages are searchable within hours " taking no longer than a day to appear within site search results.



Google Site Search, our cloud-based search solution for business, helps thousands of organizations harness the power of Google.com, and fully customize search to suit their website. Along with the greater control of On-Demand Indexing, site owners get the same ease of use and fast results of Google Site Search, including:
• Set up that takes minutes and results returned in less than a second
• The ability to promote new or certain types of pages at the top of results
• Full customization controls over the look and feel of search
• A range of options for phone and email support"

SEO Starter Guide from Google

Google is getting into the SEO consulting business. Well, not quite. But, Google is now formally offering an “SEO Starter Guide” with practical advice for webmasters about improving search engine visibility and increasing traffic to a web site.

It is a 22-page PDF announced today on the Webmaster Central blog. This is the same guide Google uses internally for its own sites (YouTube, etc.).
The guide is well written and geared toward webmasters and business owners who need a basic training in SEO. Topics covered include:
• Page Titles
• Description Meta Tag
• URL Structure
• Site Navigation
• Creating Quality Content
• Anchor Text
• Heading Tags (H1s, H2s, etc.)
• Image Optimization
• Robots.txt
• Rel=”nofollow”
• Website Promotion
• Webmaster Tools
• Analytics
• More Resources

How to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute on individual links. Many in the SEO industry have thought this attribute is a red flag, something that tells Google that a professional SEO has been tweaking the page, and not something that an average webmaster would even know about. That’s clearly not the case anymore; rel=”nofollow” is more mainstream now thanks to a full page of explanation in this SEO guide.

Google adding new tools to Gmail
Google is introducing new tools that will convert its free email service into a video and audio channel for people who want to see and hear each other while they communicate.
Activating the features, introduced on Tuesday, will require a free piece of software as well as a Webcam, which are becoming more commonplace as computer manufacturers embed video equipment into laptops.
Once the additional software is installed, Gmail users will be given the option to see and hear each other without leaving the email application.
The video feature will work only if all the participants have Gmail accounts. It's supposed to be compatible with computers running the Windows operating system or Apple's Mac computers.
Google also modified Google Reader, a popular tool for setting up Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds from favorite websites, to feature automatic translation of content into users' chosen languages.
An RSS feed can be set up using Google Reader, for example, to pull articles from a Turkish blog or website, and the content can be automatically translated into English or any of the other nearly 20 languages available.
Google has been adding more bells and whistles to Gmail as part of its effort to gain ground on the longtime leaders in free email, Yahoo and Microsoft.

LinkedIn Events Bring Conference Networking Online

LinkedIn has launched a new events feature, letting you know about upcoming conferences and other functions in your industry. Smartly, LinkedIn Events pulls information from sites like Eventbrite and then builds features around it as opposed to re-creating the wheel by asking users to build a new event database from scratch.
The features that LinkedIn has built are much as you’d expect: search for events using a variety of filters, indicate that you plan on attending, and see who else is going to so you can do some pre and post event networking using the site. There are some other interesting LinkedIn-specific features, like integration with LinkedIn’s version of the News Feed so activities are broadcast, as well as event recommendations based on your profile information.

Optimize your Adsense AD's
Google has kicked off a series of videos for AdSense tips at the Inside AdSense blog. This is an effort to help publishers get the most out of their AdSense accounts. After all, the better publishers make out from the program, the better the program will continue to perform for Google right?





Google start Video series

The first video looks at ad sizes, and Google recommends them big. They suggest using the following sizes:

- 300x250 medium rectangle
- 728x90 leaderboard
- 160x600 skyscraper

These ad units have proven in the past to deliver better results for both publishers and advertisers. Advertisers favour these formats, and if you've receiving all ad types, you'll find that advertisers will specifically target your sites more often. If you position your ad units well, users will be more likely to see these ad formats and find an ad that they're interested in.

Google AdWords Quality Score Changes

The Google 'Inside AdWords' blog has announced changes to how they calculate quality score and rank ads. The changes will remove the bias of ad.

Quality Score Update: Google have confirmed that click-through rate (CTR) remains the most significant component of the quality score, because it directly indicates which ads are the most relevant to their users, but they have now removed the influence of ad position on this calculation.

This is because ads higher on the page are more visible and usually get more clicks over those in lower positions for this reason alone, not necessarily because it's a more relevant ad. In an effort to show the most relevant ads, Google will adjust its calculations to remove the influence "position has on the CTR.

Ads Above Search Results: Google have also tweaked for formula to determine which ads are displayed in the yellow section above search results. Previously, ads displayed in this area had to meet a certain quality threshold, and if the first listing didn't have a high enough AdRank (quality score x CPC), no ads were displayed in this section.

Now, Google are allowing ads in position 2 and 3 to leapfrog over position 1 and appear in the yellow section if they have a high enough quality score.

The changes appear to be placing less importance on how much your bidding, but rather what your quality score is.

For those of you who are unsure, quality score is Google's version of PageRank for AdWords. It takes into account a range of factors to rate the quality of each keyword in your ad group/s.

These enhancements will be released shortly by Google, so keep an eye on your ad position, spend and performance over the next few weeks!

Included link: Inside AdWords

Google Offers Migration Service to Transfer Content from AOL
AOL has recently decided to go for a more open and social approach, not unlike Yahoo. They've opened up their homepage to third party content, and are allowing users to update social network profiles right from there as well.

Ironically, AOL dropped its blogging service AOL Journals (among other services). I find this interesting because I consider blogs to be one of the top forms of social media, in the respect that they give people a voice, and their own community via readership and commentary.

Google sees this as an opportunity to get plenty of those AOL Journals users on board with its own service - Blogger. A post on Blogger Buzz welcomes those people with open arms providing links to a Blogger Tour, help resources, and a user group. But it doesn't stop there.

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=blogger&naui=8<mpl=aol&continue=http://www.blogger.com/aj-import.g&skipvpage=true
Google is being proactive in the matter, and going so far as to offer a migration tool so that AOL Journals users can easily transport their content to Blogger. To use the tool, follow these steps as outlined by Google:

1. Sign in with the Google Account you would like associated with your blog. If you don't have a Google Account, make one.

2. Once you've signed in with your Google Account, you'll be asked to enter your AOL Journal URL. Do so and click "continue."

3. On the next page you'll be asked to sign in with your AOL OpenID screen name or email address.

4. The import process will then begin and may take a few minutes to complete.

5. After your blog finishes importing, you'll be asked to choose a title for your new Blogger blog as well as a new address.

6. Once you've chosen a new title and address, you can then select one of their blog templates.

7. Click "view your imported posts" to visit your blog at its new address.

Sounds easy enough right?

This is a smart move on Google's part. They knew bloggers would want to continue, and would be forced to find a new service to use. The easier the transition for the user, the more likely they are to use that new service. I wonder how many have gone the Blogger route.

You can now create and embed presentations in your Likedin Profile


You are now able to embed a Google Docs presentation in your LinkedIn profile, allowing you to enhance your professional profile with text, images, and videos.

LinkedIn, it's the world's largest online professional network. LinkedIn allows you to create a profile that showcases your skills and talents, and helps you find and connect with your trusted contacts and share ideas and opportunities.

Who might benefit from an embedded presentation in their profile? Graphic designers and photographers can showcase examples of their work or even their entire portfolios. Musicians and media producers can display performances and videos using embedded YouTube videos in their slides. But these are just a few ideas.

LinkedIn application was built on OpenSocial, an open standard for building social applications across the web, which means that in the future, it will be easy to run this app on any site that supports OpenSocial.

Add our app in LinkedIn to display your own Google Docs presentation in your profile.

Add your app:

Google Ads and Expandable Product Listings

Reports have been coming through about a new Google AdWords format being tested on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Google is exploring the idea of offering a plus box option for sponsored ads, where users can expand the ad to view actual product listings (with pictures) by the advertiser.

Reports have been coming through about a new Google AdWords format being tested on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google is now exploring the idea of offering a plus box option for sponsored ads, where users can expand the ad to view actual product listings, with pictures, by the advertiser.

Many SEO purists are concerned that the expanding ads in the top position will push organic listings too far down the page. In my opinion, its "much ado about nothing" as the default when the results page loads is the contracted version of the ads.

If a user chooses to expand the ads, then they've made the decision to view the product listings, and accordingly focus on the sponsored listings over the organic ones.

A similar AdWords test which include product listings in ads was reported at the start of this year. But the new version with images could be a sign that Google is closer to launching the format as a permanent option.

At this stage, it seems that the advertisers will need to submit their products to Google via Google base, with the listings somehow linked to their AdWords campaign/s.


No official release has been made by Google with specifications and details on the new ad format, but should it generate enough interest from advertisers, I'm sure we'll see it added to the constantly evolving Google AdWords platform.

Google Analytics Upgrade:

AdSense Reporting, Visualization Tools,.....More

Google Analytics is rolling out what it calls a “significant upgrade” to its feature set. The new tools include AdSense integration, Motion Charts, advanced segmentation, an API, custom reports, and an updated user interface to highlight these new tools better.

Online publishers may be most interested in the AdSense integration tools coming to Google Analytics. After linking an AdSense and Analytics account, you’ll be able to see AdSense data including:
• total revenue, impressions, clicks, and click-through ratio
• revenue per day, per hour, etc.
• revenue per page (what pages are most profitable)
• revenue per referral (what other sites bring you profitable traffic)
The Google Analytics API, which is currently in private beta, will open up analytics data for developers to export and use however they want. Advanced segmentation allows users to dig deeper into subsets of traffic, such as “visits with conversions,” or create their own segment types. Custom reporting lets users create their own comparisons of metrics.
Google has created a series of videos showing how some of these new tools work.

Google Warning Sites About Security Issues

Patrick Chapman explained on the Webmaster Central Blog, "We will be leaving messages for owners of potentially vulnerable sites in the Google Message Center that we provide as a free service as part of Webmaster Tools." An old version of WordPress will get singled out in a first test involving five or six thousand webmasters.

Here's the really interesting part, though: "If you manage a website but haven't signed up for Webmaster Tools, don't worry. The messages will be saved and if you sign up later on, you'll still be able to access any messages that Google has left for your site."

So we wind up with unsolicited advice that's stuck in a time capsule. This seems a little Big Brother-ish of Google, but it's hard to argue with something that improves sites' security. As most experts will agree, security tends to become more of a problem with every passing month.

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Hack Alert For CMS Programs - Search Marketing News Blog - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Hack Alert For CMS Programs - Search Marketing News Blog - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Google will be alerting sites to possible hacks of their CMS programs the Google Webmaster Central blog announced today. Nice addition guys.

Recently we've seen more websites get hacked because of various security holes. In order to help webmasters with this issue, we plan to run a test that will alert some webmasters if their content management system (CMS) or publishing platform looks like it might have a security hole or be hackable.

Google Webmaster Central release Updates

Google Webmaster Central has released some updates: one to the API settings and one to the crawl errors feature.
Here is new things you can do with your API settings:

• Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server's capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.
• Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn't reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide information to help us determine where your target users are located.
• Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.
• Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.
For the crawl error feature, you now get to see the URL of the inbound link that is linking to an error page.

Google Webmaster Tools Now Provide Source Data For Broken Links

Google Webmaster Tools Now Provide Source Data For Broken Links

Ever since Google Webmaster Tools started reporting on broken links to a site, webmasters have been asking for the sources of those links.

Today, Google has delivered. From Webmaster Tools you can now see the page that each broken link is coming from. This information should be of great help for webmasters in ensuring the visitors find their sites and that their links are properly credited.

Google Want links, but what kind of links?

Google with a tutorial on inbound links. It says basically what SEO experts have been saying for years: content and inbound links are most important, and in that order.
Just because it’s old news doesn’t mean it’s bad news. Google’s had a real history of silence on the SEO side of things, and experts were often left to theorize and test—and worse, try to game. Google sent a pretty loud signal this time last year by hitting the PageRanks of paid directories, a move seeming to confirm basic white-hat SEO tactics. The virtues of naturally gained, editorial inbound links and directly denounces links appear “spammy,” or not “merit-based.”
One of the strongest ranking factors on a site is the site's content. Additionally, perhaps a site is also linked from three sources -- however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Given the user's query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site's content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.

Here are four bullet points on how to earn merit-based links, paraphrased below:
• Start a site-related blog, writing or video, research or entertainment.
• Be interesting. Be a teacher.
• Participate in the community surrounding your industry—social media, blog comments, user reviews.
• Provide useful products or services.

In short: content, content, content, a little participation, and the links will come.

Soon you can track your business with Google RSS

Google will unveil the new RSS alert service for Web Search, which will sit aside it's current email alerts. Web search alerts make it easier for website and business owners to keep track of their listings and references in Google's web results.

Google currently offers RSS alerts for its News and Blog search services, but is the last of the top 3 search engines to offer feed alerts on its core search results. Microsoft and Yahoo! have offered RSS alerts for quite some time.

For those of you wondering what's so special about Google Search RSS alerts, it makes tracking your site/business in the search engine much easier.

You'll get an automate update every time Google indexes new content that references a particular keyword or search term such as your website or business.

For example, I have set up my main keywords for some Pages and feeds as a Google alert. So everytime Google's spiders crawl and index a web page or article that references us, I get alerted.

It helps me keep up to date on our reputation online, check some of our SEO strategies and generally keep my finger on the pulse. It's also a great way to keep on top of what your competitors are doing.

As said, RSS feeds will be an extension of Google Alerts, which currently only allow notification by email.Screen-scraping Google results was already easily possible but once live, RSS feeds should be a nice addition nevertheless, especially for all the tools out there which only work on RSS. Theres no specific launch date set for this, Google says.

Inside AdWords: AdWords Editor 6.5 for Windows and Mac

Inside AdWords: AdWords Editor 6.5 for Windows and Mac

This release includes several features to help you navigate and manage your account, such as a new Keyword Opportunities tool, horizontal scrolling in the data view, and auto-sizing columns. You can learn more about these and other new features in the release notes.

YouTube, Now with Click-to-Buy

YouTube has begun placing click-to-buy links beneath videos. This is the beginning of a greater plan to offer YouTube as an e-commerce platform to interested companies.
Amazon, iTunes, EMI Music and Electronic Arts are among the first to get a crack at the new feature, which is currently only available in the United States.
Memo to Viacom: Instead of suing Google and YouTube, which is costing you undoubtedly large sums of money in legal fees, you might try advertising on the wildly popular online video network instead.

Advertise with online video.

Online video is becoming quite popular, and it stands to reason that opportunities for video advertising are increasing right along with that popularity.

Sure, ads in online videos aren't nearly as popular as the videos themselves. Actually, they tend to annoy users who just want to watch a TV show or whatever. It's really not that different than television, except that ad time in online video tends to be much shorter, so the ads don't drive users away.

Ads are how many online video providers monetize their sites though, and they are going to have ads regardless, so they might as well be your ads.

Apart from true online video, Google has even made it easier to get your video ads on television. They just signed a deal with NBC Universal that will see them putting ads for clients on the network's stations such as MSNBC, CNBC, Sci-Fi, Oxygen, Sleuth, and Chiller. If all goes well, they will likely add more stations as well - possibly even NBC.

The interesting part about this is that you can manage your ads from the same place as your Google AdWords account. So think about how easy it would be to transition the ads you make for online rotation to traditional television.

The bottom line is: online video is getting bigger. You don't want to be left behind and miss out on potential customers because you don’t have a presence.

Microsot's headoffice for search is moving to Norway

A New Advertising Opportunity from MySpace



MySpace has recently launched a new ad program: MySpace Music, a new service that lets people create their own playlists of songs, and offers a huge catalog of millions of major label and independent label songs to stream on demand. This can be a very big and popular service.

What they did is to start a new advertising program that MySpace announced just before the launch of MySpace Music. While it is geared toward bands to help promote themselves, since MySpace is such a great tool for them to do so, there is no reason that any small business can't utilize the same program.

It is a self-serve ad program that allows users to create their own banner ads easily, and then target them toward the audience that they wish. You can narrow your campaign down by gender, geographical area, or age, based on information that users supply on their profile pages.

Users can use MySpace's new tool to track their ads' performance, and control how much they spend on any campaign. There is a minimum of $25, but you can spend as little as that, and up to $10,000, and you only pay when your ad is clicked on.

MySpace is still very popular, and will probably grow more now that MySpace Music has been launched. Since lovers of just about every kind of music can find something they like with MySpace Music, they should make up just about every demographic you could possibly want to go after with your advertising campaign.

This Should Be Great for Small Businesses

Facts about the Yahoo-Google advertising agreement

Facts about the Yahoo-Google advertising agreement

Google has launched a new informational site designed to tell its story about why there's no need to fear an ad partnership between it and Yahoo. Within the site, you'll lots of information about the deal except for one key fact: when exactly does it start? The launch of the site suggests any day now.

Google Book Search APIs - Google Code

The Google Book Search Blog announced the new developer site for the Google Book Search APIs. The API allows developers to add Google Book Search features to their web site.

For example, you can now embed book previews, when available, to books listed on your site.With this API, anyone can:

* Embed book previews on your site
* Add book search results to your site
* Locate book information, reviews, ratings, labels, and user libraries
* Send Google user-generated content
* Link your users to Google Book Search
* and more.

More details here:

Social Networking in the Sky - Yahoo! News

Airlines are edging into online social networking, giving air travelers an opportunity to share experiences and maybe score some discounted airfares. In return, the airlines are developing a marvelous new marketing tool.

Just this week, Lufthansa, the dominant German carrier, introduced what it says is the first-ever dedicated airline-sponsored social network for college students: GenFlyLounge.com. GenFlyLounge.com allows duly enrolled student-members to compare notes on travel experiences and destinations and buy discounted student airfares on Lufthansa. Users must have current .edu e-mail addresses and present college IDs when they check-in at the airport for their flights.

Lufthansa's virtual lounge follows by 18 months KLM Royal Dutch Airlines' launch of online communities KLM Club Africa and Club China - which target road-warrior business executives who fly often to Africa and China - and Flying Blue Golf, which is aimed at duffers. This last social network is especially notable; it allows golfers to comment on their golf scores and courses they have played, use KLM frequent flyer points to buy golfing equipment and, of course, book golfing trips on KLM.

Recently, Scandinavian Airlines moved to establish close ties with a high-profile, high-income demographic group by establishing a Web site dedicated to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender/transsexual community.

Inside AdWords: Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days

Inside AdWords: Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days

Still no mention on turning on old accounts when they stop the inactive status, but they have given more details on how the Quality Score is measured including all of the CTRs in your account. This may force people to be a lot tighter with the keywords they add to their accounts so they do not have to pay higher rates for their established terms.

There are some interesting new details:

For queries without many advertisers competing for placement, the first page bid estimate should be relatively close to your existing minimum bid. However, queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates, because you'll likely need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than your competition and show on the first page. Remember that you can bid less than your first page bid estimate and still show on subsequent pages -- as long as your keyword is relevant to our users.
Advertisers familiar with the competitive landscape for their keywords may indeed notice that the first page bid estimates provided are in line with the CPCs that they had been bidding to appear on the first page prior to the release of these Quality Score improvements, although this is not a given.

Is Crome The End To Google Toolbar PageRank?

Here are a few comments from Digital Forums


Google's new browser Chrome has been launched, but it does not support Google Toolbar, does it indicate that its end of PageRank (PR)?

yes may be its beta stage, but in my opinion Google would have came out with browser to support all its other products. I guess they might come out with updated version of toolbar with some new technology.

It's in beta and the best browser out there. Such fast. It will start to get slower as new things get added. Like google toolbar of course. I mean pagerank is their greatest invention, not chrome.

It won't mean the end of PR. In fact if anything Google will be using it to further promote it's PR calculation.
So it is the end of all toolbars! You should wait , for sure they will launch a lot of add-ons.

may be you are right, but still there is no support for Google toolbar on Chrome.
Google toolbar is something which simply displays pagerank, you can find out pagerank from many other sources. The reason it doesn't support it is because it is in beta stages, quite obviously.

I like Google Chrome. It's faster then all the other browsers I've been using before. True, a little PR icon would be cool, but since Google has revised the whole PR system latley, it'll take some time for many sites to re-obtain their new revised PR, just like my Ralf Engel dot Com blog.

Google didn't create chrome for webmasters alone. They created it for users for now and maybe they will create add ons for webmasters in their next update.

First things first. Chrome is still in beta. It is not the final version. There are tens of other things in the Google Toolbar as well, so why only Pagerank? The question should be does it indicate the end of Google Toolbar? Not Pagerank in specific. I personally think that it is NOT the ended of Google Pagerank or the toolbar itself.

Google Operating System (Unofficial Google Blog)

Google Operating System (Unofficial Google Blog)

Googling in Person to Make Friends - NYTimes.com

Googling in Person to Make Friends - NYTimes.com

It's Not Just About Adwords Anymore

Google is trying to get advertising agencies to warm up to it after years of not being their favorite entity. After all, think of all the marketing dollars spent on search engine advertising (and SEO campaigns for that matter) that agencies missed out on because of a certain search giant.

Aggressive Advertising

It's not unreasonable to suspect that Google has its own best interests in mind. Why wouldn't it? The company does seem to be working its way further into the advertising world more aggressively than ever. For example, they're talking about not even waiting for Federal approval before going forward with their ad deal with Yahoo.

B2B Lead Generation Tips

B2B Lead Generation Tips

The goal of many B2B search marketing programs is to generate online inquiries and leads. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) programs are designed to find highly-qualified prospects and drive them to targeted landing pages where people register to receive valuable information or complete contact forms. Below I share five simple yet effective tips to improve landing pages and registration forms - two critical elements of any lead gen program.

Could CROME be the start of an operating system

Today, Google has made a significant step toward becoming a Web-based operating system by launching a beta version of the open-source Google Chrome browser, which has been optimized to run Web applications rather than simply rendering HTML on a page.

"All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."
Chrome's main features include a beefed-up Javascript engine (aka V8), which will improve performance of AJAX apps like Gmail and Google Docs. It also offers better memory allocation, and an architecture that keeps apps running in separate windows as isolated processes -- so a crashed app won't bring down the browser, and security is markedly improved.

The browser includes its own URL box, which Google is calling the "Omnibox." It incorporates features from Google Suggest, browser history and search history.

As with the Google Toolbar before it, Chrome will also present an opportunity for Google to collect more user behavioral data. On the plus side, that could help Google develop better Web analytics applications. More cynically, Google can also take this mountain of user data and use it to better monetize its ad platforms.

Google Chrome: Google Open Source Browser [SearchEngineWatch]

Google Chrome: Google Open Source Browser [SearchEngineWatch]

Google will lounch their own Web brower. Read more.

Blogger Buzz: Show off your Followers

This could make RSS more popular !

Google's Blogger is unleashing some new features to make blogs using the platform more social. They will be rolling out these features over the next several weeks.
They want bloggers to be able to view the people that read their blogs, and will provide a gadget allowing users to display those people on the actual blogs. The way they are accomplishing this is through a "Follow this Blog" link that will appear on all Blogger blogs. Who is following whom will then be shown on the Blogger dashboard and in Google Reader, for those who use it.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web chalks up what Blogger is doing as Google's attempt to push RSS into the mainstream:

For all its supposed simplicity, Really Simple Syndication or RSS has continued to confuse and intimidate millions of people online years after its introduction...

"Follow this blog" is a clear call to action and those words will soon grace the header of every blog on Blogger.com around the web. When users click that link they'll be taken to either a tab on their Blogger dashboard, presumably if they have an account and are logged in, or be introduced to Google Reader, the company's RSS reader. It's a simple, brilliant plan and we wonder what took so long.

Will MS IE8 help Microsoft in the search battle?

Microsoft is throwing whatever it can lay its hands on, at Google. The latest evidence is the upcoming Internet Explorer 8"being built with a few tricks to try and knee-cap Google.
"We didnt design this with Google in mind," insists Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch.
The new browser comes with a search box in the upper right-hand corner and, just below that, a row of tiny logos for various search destinations, such as Yahoo, Ebay and MySpace. You can select which destinations you want to include hereAnother Google-dodging feature in the new browser: Highlighting a street address on a Web page launches a map, with the default set to Microsofts Live Maps (though you can change this default to Google Maps).
Will it be enough? Not on its own"especially as Mozillas Firefox continues to eat away at IEs market share. But, if Microsoft can throw enough pots and pans new products at Google, maybe it can at least prevent Google from reaching 100% search share.
What do you think? Will IE8 help Microsoft in its battle with Google?

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Improved Flash indexing

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Improved Flash indexing

No More Need to Trash the Flash

Google has delighted web designers the world over with the announcement that they are now indexing Adobe Flash files better than ever before.

Google can now index any kind of textual content embedded in Flash files. They can also discover URLs. From the official Google blog post:

“Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.”

Google AdSense to Be Migrated into Google Analytics

A rumor circulating that Google Analytics will soon be adding Google AdSense data to the web analytics package. Amit managed to secure some screen shots of the AdSense related reports. The AdSense specific content seems to be found under the "Content" tab and includes:

(1) AdSense ad clicks per page
(2) AdSense Revenue generated per page
(3) CTR and CPM on a per page basis
(4) Also, a "Top AdSense Referrers" report that shows you which referring sites will generate the most ad clicks for you.

Many forum members are excited at this possibility. One says that it "might "eliminate the hassle of comparing adsense impressions to google analytics page views," which is certainly true. It's better to combine the greatest features than to have them scattered throughout for sure.

The only concern is for those who share their analytics data with clients or colleagues; in this case, those sharing analytics data may not want others to see financial information. However, you can likely use a filter -- or Google may come up with a good solution to hide this information from those sharing the analytics account

Inside AdWords: New features in Website Optimizer

Inside AdWords: New features in Website Optimizer

Some days ago, the Google Adwords and Google Website Optimizer blogs reported some new updates to Google Website Optimizer.

*
Experiment Pruning: This allows you to disable one or more combinations from taking part in your Website Optimizer experiments. Pruning can help you achieve faster, more meaningful results by allowing you to remove poorly performing or illogical combinations. This is especially helpful in cases where your experiment may have too many combinations relative to the amount of traffic it receives.

In the past, there wasn't an easy way for you to disable low performing or
illogical combinations. You'd have to stop a test, make a copy, lose all your test data, and then launch a new test. That's all changing starting today. Now, you can simply select any number of page variations from your experiment report, click our new "Disable" button, and you're done. Easy as that. All your future traffic will be sent to your remaining page variations, and you'll be on the path to quicker, more actionable test results

*
A/B Offline Validation: You'll now be able to just upload a copy of your tagged page and Website Optimizer will make sure that everything is tagged properly.
*
More Intuitive Reporting: We've enhanced our reports to more clearly show how your combinations are performing, and to better indicate when we've found one or more high-confidence winning combinations. This will help prevent you from drawing false conclusions from results or from ending experiments prematurely.

Inside AdWords: Quality Score improvements

Inside AdWords: Quality Score improvements

The Google AdWords blog announced three major changes happening to the AdWords marketplace. First, Google will now calculate the quality score of your keywords at the time of the search query. Second, Google has removed the "minimum bid" metric and replaced it with "first page bid." Finally, Google will no longer mark search ads as "inactive for search."

(1) Google will no longer assign a keyword a "static" quality score, instead, Google wil calculate the quality score at the time the search is done. The quality score will take into account the searchers location, query phrase and other factors. If Google sees that for a specific advertiser, a searcher in one location, who searches for a longer tail version of the advertiser's keyword is more relevant, then that ad will receive a higher quality score at the time of the search.

(2) Google is doing away with the popular "minimum bid," replacing it with "first page bid." Why? Well, Google is no longer marking ads as "inactive for search," and thus there is no minimum bid for a search ad to be displayed. Google does explain that a past ad that had a high minimum bid or that was placed as "inactive for search," would likely not perform well with the new quality score because of the nature of the ad. So by changing it from "minimum bid" to "first page bid," Google is able to give advertiser's "better guidance on how to achieve your advertising goals."

(3) Inaction for search is no longer going to be used, meaning, search ads will never be inactive. All your ads have the ability and chance to show up for keywords, expect for the ads you have paused or deleted. Google adds that keywords previously marked as inactive, will likely not perform well, "because their combined per-query Quality Score and bid probably isn't high enough to gain competitive placement."

Verktøy for nettredaktører

Google Launches Enhanced 404 Widget

Google has launched a new tool within Google Webmaster Tools that allows Webmasters to create custom 404 pages.

To access the tool, go to Google Webmaster Tools, then click on tools on the left and then click on "Enhance 404 pages." You can then copy and paste the widget code from the Google site, into your page template.
Google is not the first search company to offer such a tool. Microsoft launched a similar tool back in June. For more information on how that works, see this page.

Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo Buzz is now open to all publishers and web sites. Yahoo announced that any Yahoo user can now "buzz up" any content from any publisher on the Web.

Yahoo Buzz launched in February of this year, as a Digg competitor. It was locked down to about 100 publishers and grew to over 400, since then. Yahoo said they have over 5 million users that have participated in the site. But now, any user can submit any web page, on the web.

Google feeds publishers with new AdSense option | Googling Google | ZDNet.com

Google feeds publishers with new AdSense option | Googling Google | ZDNet.com

No need for Feedburner anymore....

When most publishers use RSS feeds to syndicate their content, most are hoping readers click through to the original content, and then they can monetize it from there — unfortunately, consumers of this feed data are often just looking for a quick fix, and not really that interested in the actual source of the information. This has made monetizing content a bit tricky when providing full-text feeds.

When Google bought Feed Burner, they instantly got access to a whole bunch of new ad inventory — which has largely remained untapped. Google has finally publicly launched their solution to that problem — AdSense for Feeds.

Google Launches AdSense for Feeds

Google Launches AdSense for Feeds

I noticed a new option in my AdSense account: AdSense for feeds, a program that displays contextual and placement-targeted ads in FeedBurner feeds. FeedBurner announced in May that AdSense for Feeds will be available to a small number of publishers and now it seems that everyone can use it.

FeedBurner has recently closed FAN, its advertising network. "No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential," says a FeedBurner/Google employee.

Google Search Results Show Metadata for Scientific Papers

Google Search Results Show Metadata for Scientific Papers

Google started to integrate in the search results information about the scientific papers included in Google Scholar. Below the snippet, Google lists the authors, the number of citations and links to related articles and other versions available online. The integration is not perfect and the search results look cluttered, but it's yet another class of results that have richer snippets.

Official Google Blog: New enhancements on the Google content network

Official Google Blog: New enhancements on the Google content network

Inside AdSense: A picture isn't always worth a thousand words

Inside AdSense: A picture isn't always worth a thousand words

Google Adsense Ads and Relevance

Google Adsense team helped users understand how to get higher quality and more relevant Google Adsense ads to display within your content:

1. Use text in addition to images when possible. Please note that the crawler can't read text contained within images.

2. If you use images, be sure to title them appropriately and provide descriptive ALT tags.

3. Try imagining your site without pictures or dynamic content. This will give you a good idea of what our crawler reads. If you lack imagination, you can try turning the images off in your web browser.

If your site uses a lot of these features, make sure you provide enough text-based content in one of our supported languages to effectively convey the topic of your site. If our crawler doesnt find enough text, you may get poorly targeted ads

Inside AdWords

Inside AdWords

Google Insights for Search
Google recently added search volume estimates to their keyword tool. They also recently launched Google Trends, Google Hot Trends, Google Trends for Websites, and the Google Ad Planner. And now Google hits the competitive research market with yet another product - Google Insights for Search.

Google upgrades Search Appliance with bigger index, added enterprise features

Google upgrades Search Appliance with bigger index, added enterprise features

Google on Wednesday announced a new version of its enterprise-oriented Google Search Appliance that the company said can index up to 10 million documents in a single box — up from 3 million previously — while also giving IT managers more control over the search results that end users see.

For instance, the new version lets IT admins set pages with certain metadata, such as a particular author's name, to show up higher in search results. Or they can bias results so that engineers get pages that have particular keywords or come from certain data repositories, while marketers typing in the exact same search terms see different results, according to Nitin Mangtani, Google's lead product manager for enterprise search.