Archive for the ‘Adwords Info’ Category

1st April 2008

Google News Makes Commenting More Visible

The Google News Blog announced that they have made two changes to the commenting feature, in order to make it more visible to their users.

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1st April 2008

Online Marketers: Stop Funding Virtual Blight

Urban blight is easy to recognize: seedy liquor stores and payday lenders on alternating corners, trash-strewn lots and front yards, graffitti-covered buildings, crumbling sidewalks, broken glass, and billboards everywhere you look. Websites afflicted with virtual blight are just as easy to spot: banners promising hot sexy singles and cheating spouses, pornography and Viagra, payday loans and OEM prices on Adobe’s Creative Suite 3, all bombarding us with offers that are ethically suspect and often illegal.

The devastation of urban blight is well documented. Residents flee, businesses move out, and property values plummet; the only people left are the ones who cannot afford to live anywhere else. The damage done by Virtual Blight goes well beyond the devaluation suffered by the site owner. The real damage is in the perception of the Internet as a trustworthy medium, a safe place to do business and promote your brand. Americans spends more time online than watching TV.

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1st April 2008

Google Deemphasizes Search In Experimental Mobile Interface

Spotted over the weekend by Garrett Rogers, Google has quietly introduced a new, experimental mobile interface called “LCB” that emphasizes browsing instead of search. Something of a radical approach for Google, which is synonymous with search, the site allows users to get to results in top “local search” categories such as restaurants, travel, transportation, retail, entertainment, and sports without having to enter a query. Most results are two clicks down.

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1st April 2008

A New Scourge For Yahoo: Affiliate Mapspam

I’ve been writing about Mapspam appearing in both Google and Yahoo search results for some time now. Mapspam is where black hat SEOs spam local search and map listings, and like all black hat techniques, it seems to get more sophisticated as the search engines find ways to combat the spammers’ techniques.

There’s a new species of mapspam that’s particularly obnoxious: affiliate mapspam, first reported at the eClick Performance Blog. With the search engines’ new open policies allowing even non-owners of businesses to edit local business listings, unscrupulous affiliates take advantage of a loophole by editing unclaimed hotel records, changing the URL so that it first points to an affiliate tracking link, and then ultimately redirecting the searcher to the hotel’s official website. This tactic earns the affiliate a referral fee for any reservations made. The affiliate interjects themselves, invisibly to the searcher, between the end user and the hotel, for the sole purpose of collecting an essentially unearned profit.

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1st April 2008

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 21, 2008

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Search Biz: Probing Wikipedia’s Finances, Facebook Toast? & Google Denies Evading Chinese Taxes
It’s well known that Wikipedia is maintained by a legion of volunteers throughout the world. Structured as a non-profit, the site features no advertising, despite being the #7 most visited destination on the web, and a property that most advertisers would kill to get exposure on. Which begs the…
Search In Pictures: Snoop Dogg, St. Patrick’s Day & Danny Exposed
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more….
LinkedIn Adds New Company Directory
LinkedIn, with help from BusinessWeek’s CapitalIQ, has added a company directory and related factual information to its business network. It’s not easy to get to the company directory, which is only accessible to LinkedIn users at the moment. One can’t simply go to the LinkedIn search box and type a…
Google Suggest Becoming A Default Feature?
I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable spotting a WebmasterWorld thread that has three members noticing Google Suggest like features on Google.com. Basically, when these users go to Google.com and begin typing in a query, Google begins to offer search suggestions. Google has implemented this feature as a default on…
Google Analytics Benchmarking Data Now Live
The Google Analytics Benchmarking feature is now live for those users who have chosen to opt in to the program. You can access the data by visiting a site profile and clicking on “Visitors” and then on “Benchmarking (Beta).” Google said that the current list of “verticals and the quality…
Google Gets What It Wanted From 700MHz Auction
The US 700MHz auction is now over; the winners were announced yesterday. The spectrum is becoming available as television broadcasters make the mandated switch to digital signals in early 2009. The big winners (no surprises here) were US carriers Verizon and AT&T. Verizon bid more than $9 billion and won…
Human Hardware: Men and Women
In this week’s column on Human Hardware, we look at the differences between the two basic models of humans: men and women. As a species, the vast majority of our history has been spent not really thinking about the differences between men and women. The distinctions seemed obvious, and…