Advertisement

Upcoming Seminars: 5 Ghastly PPC Mistakes to Avoid - SEM Agencies and Reporting: Best Practices for Success

Listen to this podcast now using the Odeo player below:

Stories Discussed In The Show

• Google Confirms Small Test With Newspaper Ads
  Last week we have been [1] [2] tracking PPC Discussions request from Google to participate in a test on placing his ads in newspapers. The main press now gets a hold of it with official confirmation from Google that they will be once again testing ads in newspapers. The New York Times and Business Week have the two most popular articles, I believe. They state that the ads will appear in "50 major newspapers" and that a "100 advertisers" are in this test that will begin to happen "later this month."...
• Google Publication Ads Old Sign-Up page,
• Google Publication Ads Editorial Guidelines
• Google Working To Stop Lawsuits Over YouTube
  The Financial Times reports that Eric Schmidt's Google is running from media company to media company trying to offer upfront cash, in sums of "tens of millions of dollars," to slow and "halt" the threat they pose to YouTube. FT.com says that Schmidt met with CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp and others recently. There are some more details over at paidContent....
• Google Wins Right To Buy YouTube In Antitrust Review
  The Chicago Tribune reports that Google has won the right to buy YouTube after antitrust authorities reviewed the documents by the Federal Trade Commission. So now it is official, Google can go through with the acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion....
• German English football leagues mull legal action against Google, LSE
• Topix.net Gains $15 Million Investment From Newspaper Parents
  News aggregator and search engine Topix.net announced a new round of funding in which its newspaper owners, Gannett, Tribune Co. and McClatchy, have invested $15 million in the site to help further develop it. According to Hitwise, Topix has been on a tear and, according to the company itself, is now a "top 25" news site. Over the course of the past year Topix has had success developing community forums and has launched local classifieds. The site also recently implemented a news archive search. I have more discussion of the investment and its potential implications for newspapers on my blog....
• ChaCha Search: Take Two
  When "human-powered" search engine ChaCha launched in September it was a great idea with very flawed execution. The site offers algorithmic search, but also IM-chat based search with actual people in real time. Here's my previous post on ChaCha. Today, the site has gone from "alpha" to "beta" based on lessons learned during the alpha period. And it appears from casual searching there have been some significant improvements....
• Google Earth Release 4 Adds Drawing Tools
  Nathan Weinberg reports that Google released a new version of Google Earth. The new version has "path and polygon drawing tools" to enable you to "easily sketch figures on the imagery for richer annotations and can share these overlays as KML or KMZ files." There are some other features, but that one is the most significant....
• Gmail Tests Open In Google Spreadsheets Link
  Philipp Lenssen reports that Google is testing a link to open your Microsoft Excel documents within Google's Spreadsheets application. I tried sending myself an XLS document, but I did not get the "Open In Google Spreadsheets" hyperlink. Philipp has a screen capture of it in action, and he explains, "We can expect much more of this cross-integration to be rolled out in the future."...
• Windows Live Product Upload Released
  LiveSide.Net reports that Microsoft launched Live Product Upload over the weekend. A tool that allows catalogers to upload their products to "Live Product Search database. LiveSide that this feature "guarantees their inclusion in the Live Search extension."...
• Yahoo Slurp Adds Wildcard Support For Robots.txt
  The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo's web crawler, aka Yahoo Slurp, now supports wildcards in the robots.txt file. The two parameters that Yahoo now supports include the "*" and the "$." The * will tell Yahoo to do a "wildcard match a sequence of characters in your URL." The & will tell Yahoo to do a "anchor the match to the end of the URL string." Many more details at the Yahoo Search Blog....
• Yahoo Asking Users To Rate Usefulness Of Search Results
  SEOdisco has screen captures of Yahoo asking him to rate how useful he finds the first two organic results for his search query. He is asked to rate it on a scale from one to five, one being "not useful" and five being "very useful". This is not the first time we have seen Yahoo ask people to rate search results, I reported it back in July of this year. In addition, we know Google occasionally asks users to rate the AdWords results....
• Yahoo Sending Panama Invites Out
  I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable this morning that Yahoo! Search Marketing Version 2.0 (Panama) Invites Going Out. I was one of the first to be invited to upgrade to the Panama release, but outside of my group, it appears that now others who have requested the upgrade are now receiving them. Wondering what the process for upgrading is? Well, (1) it takes about 8 hours for the upgrade to happen, so it while you do not need to make changes to your account and (2) keyword listings with zero impressions for past 13 months or zero clicks for...
• Lack of Editorial Transparency a Nagging Concern with AdWords in a Quality Score World, Traffick
• How Much Should SEOs Earn
  Rand at SEOMoz has another excellent post named SEO Salaries - How Much Should You Make. He details what he believes SEOs of all calibers should make. Here is a quick snap shot:...
• SEM Salaries Revisited
• Ask.com Creates Flash Demo To Explain Why Ask.com "Is Better"
  Ask.com released a new flash demonstration that goes through all the features of search engine. The purpose of the demo is to illustrate to standard web users, how Ask.com provides easy to use tools and quick "smart answers" to give you a "better" overall search experience. I think they did an excellent job with it, starting the demo off explaining that Ask.com is different, in that they help you "Find" and not just "Search." The demo is linked to from the Ask.com home page but if you are on a Mac you won't see it. You will have to go...
• Google Owns AdSense.com Now
  Nathan Weinberg reports that Google is now the owner of the domain adsense.com. The story goes a bit back when a company named the AdSense Consulting Group became Fed Up With Google AdSense, after receiving tons of unwanted traffic and inquiries on AdSense consulting services. They did not disclose the amount AdSense.com was sold for, but you can still visit the AdSense Consulting Group at www.adsense2.com. I wonder if Google will do the same with UTube.com, kinda similar to News.com's story that YouTube.com sued by UTube.com....
  AdSense Consulting Group Fed Up With Google AdSense, Search Engine Watch Blog
  
  
  AdSense Consulting's message against Google