Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search: 01/01/2005

Personalized Search

iMediaConnection: Personalized Search: "ChoiceStream's Steve Johnson looks deeper into this marketing technique. "

Yahoo tool sends local info to cell phones

CNET News.com
"Yahoo tool sends local info to cell phones"

SEO: The True Cost of Doing It Wrong

searchengineguide.com
Scott Buresh writes that "companies use well-intentioned but over-eager internal resources that implement dated, and often dangerous, methodologies. Such strategies may work in the short term, but it is typically only a matter of time before the search engines catch on to the gimmick and the site becomes penalized...

Lost Opportunity Cost

Search is currently one of the hottest marketing channels in the world, and increasing numbers of companies are jumping into the mix and realizing outstanding returns on their investment. However, it can take several months to attain optimal results with search engine optimization, and choosing the wrong provider or using ineffective methodology can delay any returns. It is critical that the methodologies used at the outset are effective and timely to minimize the waiting period for results.

Disenchantment Leading to Channel Abandonment

Worse yet, sometimes a company that hired an inexperienced or unscrupulous firm, or used internal resources to little effect, will abandon the idea of pursuing SEO. Frequently, companies will make blanket statements about how SEO "doesn't work for their business", because they didn’t get results from a single poorly-executed initiative. This mistaken belief is potentially the most expensive cost of doing SEO wrong, since the major increases in revenue that SEO can provide are never realized by such companies (although they are often realized by that company’s competitors). "

Going Where the Searchers Are

Going Where the Searchers Are: "The study showed that just 8% of online product searches result in an immediate purchase.
So how can you, as a small business owner tap into a revenue stream from the other 92% of searches? The results of a research study conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project may shed some light on that question. The survey tracked the searching habits of 2,200 individuals over a period of several months. 55% of those surveyed stated that half of the information they search for online is 'trivial' and 17% of searches claimed that most of the information they search for online is trivial. Those figures add up to quite a bit of searching that seemingly is without direction.
The companies that take the time to figure out how to put themselves in front of those trivial searches and that then figure out a way to monetize the results have a chance at tapping into a far greater market than the companies that are simply targeting the people that are already looking to buy. Consider the 'trivial' things that people go looking for online; funny video clips that they can forward on to their friends, information about when their new baby will start crawling, pictures of a hot new sports car that they've been dreaming about. Those 'trivial' searches are going to lead them to a Web site, why shouldn't it be yours? "

Reciprocal linking debate highlights

Google Groups : SEM 2.0 I've recently begun to doubt the value of recip links. At least with the big G. I see anectdotal evidence that G has a filter (whatever you may want to call it) that detects mutual site cross links, or recip links....

I tend to think that link building consists of two main parts...

Broad link popularity.
Niche topical popularity...
Reciprocal links should reflect a natural business relationship or have a logic to them that stands separate from the PR value of trading links...

Sometime last summer G upgraded one-way incoming links to a much higher importance. G is looking for one-way links, deep links, recips, and directory links. Internal navigation links using the full URL are important in the mix as well...G engineers stress they want to see a 'natural link pattern' in both the type of link and the speed they are acquired. 200 links appearing in one week with identical anchor text for example is not a 'natural' pattern. G likes links to appear nice and slow and have 5 or 6 different variations on the anchor text including the URL as anchor text.

The Yahoo Factor - loyalty and local search

technologyreview.com: "Yahoo is gaining ground on its top competitors, according to a survey by Market Researcher Keynote. While Google, Yahoo and MSN were the top choices of the 2,000 consumers surveyed, Yahoo maintained the highest user loyalty, primarily because of its localized search. "

New Directory Search Engine - Webs Biggest

Webs Biggest

Yahoo local search to mobile by tcxt

Internet News Article | Reuters.com: "Yahoo Inc.began offering on Thursday a new tool that allows users of its local search service to send restaurant or business information in the form of a text message from a computer to a mobile phone."

ninetyninezeros

ninetyninezeros: "ninetyninezeros
life @ google from the inside"

Search Engine Changes Blur the Line Between Myth and Reality

searchengineguide.com

Summarises the situation as "In a field as user-dependent and re-evolutionary as the search industry, knowledge gaps can lead to expensive chaos for consumers, advertisers and web-masters. Many common assumptions about search engine marketing have been made obsolete or require a different way of thinking. Many erroneous assumptions continue to be proliferated in hundreds of forum posts, emails and marketing articles.

Concludes "If these five myths die this year, the sector will be a cleaner place to work in. Advertisers will be less likely to be scammed into believing their SEO has a special relationship with the search firms. They will also have a more realistic view of the long-term commitment it takes to run a successful organic placement campaign and will be able to better budget for services. People would stop obsessing over submissions, penalizations, and other irrelevancies and get on with the business of producing great websites. Lastly, if the final myth about the value of doorway pages is undone, consumers would see stronger SERPs and some advertisers would save a lot money and the eventual heartache of displaced rankings"

Moving Search to the Next Level, pay per call

iMediaConnection: SearchTHIS

"pay per call is coming of age...

The interaction is simple and requires five simple steps to get up and going:

Create Your Pay Per Call Ad: design a search listing
Choose Your Service Areas: decide on geographic relevance
Select Your Business Categories: select up to five yellow pages like categories
Set Your Phone Call Lead Price: jump into the action auction
Choose Your Payment Plan: how much and how often you spend "

Provider: Ingenio Pay Per Call: Home

Link Reputation Measurement Tool

for advertising and promotion online - The Link Reputation Measurement Tool
"Reveals backlinks pointing to your target url along with the following:
Link Survey (for the page of each backlink -
# of outbound links
* Note - Outbound links here does not mean only links pointing offsite.
estimated # of inbound links - according to Google

Link Reputation Score (of each backlink for the target theme) The higher the score, the better the reputation conferred by the backlink.

Text used in links pointing to you (from the page of each backlink)
Alexa traffic analysis for the site corresponding to each backlink
(Backlinks are gathered from Google using Google API. "

Google's Global User Share Rises

Onestat!

Google is the world's most-used search engine,
increasing its share from 56.4 percent to 57.2 percent in the
past eight months, a new study found. OneStat.com also
reported that Yahoo's global usage share is holding steady at
21.3 percent. Google and Yahoo are the largest search engines,
followed distantly by MSN Search with 8.6 percent usage and
AOL Search with 3.5 percent. OneStat's data are a two-month
average of visitors to Internet sites from search engines,
tracked in 100 countries.

Pew Report on Search

MediaPost Advertising & Media Directory

"Sponsored Results Naivete by Tobi Elkin Monday January 24, 2005"

Article has more detail from the report including gender differences and by demographics...

"• Men search more frequently than women and have a higher opinion of themselves as searchers than women do, despite being no more successful in finding what they're looking for!

• Forty-three percent of men have heard of the distinction between paid and unpaid results, while only 32 percent of women have heard of the difference."

SideStep.com finalist for the Codie Awards

eyefortravel.com - Travel Distribution News, Events and Analysis
"SideStep.com is the only travel search engine to have been named as a finalist for the awards' 'Best Consumer Productivity Product or Service' category. Other consumer technology leaders honored by the SIIA include Microsoft, Macromedia, Apple and Intuit. "

AOL Search results - new design

AOL Search results for "site:www.totaltravel.co.uk"

According to Internetnews.com and others AOL has added Vivisimo's search result clustering technology, organizing search results into topics.

AOL has added "SnapShots" at the top of the search results, these are links to selected sites and companies that can provide relevant information and/or products.

AOL says: "[SnapShots] include images and listings that point to relevant AOL and AOL partner content. Some Snapshots may include paid placement, which is clearly labeled as advertising. They may also include Official Sites for trademarks or brands.

AOL is working with the Norwegian company Fast on expanding its local search capabilities, main results are powered by Google.

Users Confuse Search Results, Ads

Forbes.com: Survey
"Only 1 in 6 users of Internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a new survey finds.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Sunday that adults online in the United States are generally naive when it comes to how search engines work...

Forty-five percent of Web searchers say they would stop using search engines if they thought they weren't being clear about such payments, yet 92 percent of Web searchers say they are confident about their searching abilities.

Deborah Fallows, a senior research fellow at Pew and the study's author, said the findings were surprising given that the same people are likely to know the difference between television programs and infomercials...She said the results reflect blind trust on the part of the Web searcher rather than "anything nefarious on the part of the search engine." "

Review of new MSN

SiteProNews

"MSN(beta) is Now Live " By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor,

Overview: "MSN has compiled a 5-Billion site database. Once a site is in the database, MSN looks at the number of links directed to that site. There is no hard data on the role topical relevancy plays in how MSN determines links, however it is assumed by most that anchor text plays a major role. (Anchor text did factor in our initial tests with the beta version of the engine)

Next, MSN looks at the content of the site. This is where much of the ranking determination is made. Sites with great text and clear internal link-paths are ranking very well with MSN. Of our entire client base, only one site with excellent text and internal linking lost a top placement at MSN when the new version was introduced. Strong, keyword enriched titles and body texts continue to provide strong placements. We are fairly certain that the anchor text of internal links can influence placements as well."

Note especially:

A website that has a large number of incoming links will get noticed and spidered a number of times. Google recognizes 131 unique domains linking to the Field Turf website. Yahoo notes over 1000. MSN sees far more, weighing in above 1500. Next, note the "quality" of incoming links. Google is taking a very refined approach to contextual-quality while Yahoo and MSN seem more interested in the number of links.
Titles make a big difference at all three and are an important area to work on when doing basic SEO for MSN. MSN also seems to be able to read text found in drop-down menus such as the ones on the right hand side of the Field Turf index page.

Another important factor in improving and retaining rankings is updating the site. MSN states on its "How MSN Search Works" page that pages that are active will be spidered more frequently and achieve stronger rankings."

Jim Hedger concludes: MSN going live with their own search engine is huge news with as many unknown implications as known ones. Its presence will challenge many basic assumptions about SEO and will play a large hand in determining the future of the search industry itself.

Keep up or suffer!

The 2005 Spam Conference

chongqed
posts quick links to webcasts from this year's spam conference

My pick of the bunch: Brian McWilliams who asked "what will happen when all spam is finally filtered"

Other links courtesy of Slashdot | The Spam Conference 2005
Links:
0. http://www.spamconference.org/
1. http://www.spamconference.org/webcast2005.html
2. http://www.jgc.org/
3. http://www.pc-radio.com/
4. http://www.unspam.com/fight_spam/about_unspam/management.html
5. http://www.projecthoneypot.org/
6. http://chongqed.blogspot.com/2005/01/2005-spam-conference.html

Nofollow; More On Link Condom & Blogger Worries Over Nofollow

blog.searchenginewatch.com

Danny Sullivan casts his eye over the hullaballu about "nofollow" - finds a few jokes and concludes: "It now lets the search engines say to bloggers, we gave you want you wanted, stop blaming us for the problem!"

This could mean various things from the search engine POV:

The algos cannot be altered to deal with and filter out blog comment spam
They do not want to put such a filter in place...

The condom joke site is worth a click...
Stop the spread of Viral Link Skank today

"FEATURES.....
Hoard your PageRank
Hide your outgoing links
Screw your reciprocal link partners
Add code bloat to your page
Find out today if people are buying links for the right reasons
Yet more to obsess about
Freely link to bad neighbourhoods
Far easier to use than JavaScript, perl, php, robots.txt etc "

forums.searchenginewatch.com "I, Brian" posts a thorough review of the conversation about nofollow.

The last link in his list is pretty pessimistic

"The Spammers have Won: Andy Wismar points out that the blogosphere was created and defined using comments and trackbacks - and if the "nofollow" attribute is used, it effectively means the deconstruction and devaluation of the blogosphere."

Worldwide boom in online advertising

Forbes.com
"Yahoo's 4Q Profit Nearly Triples on Ads"

"It pays to advertise. Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) posted its fourth-quarter financials Tuesday, and the news might augur well for the arena called dot-com--remember that term? The megaportal said its profit nearly tripled, far outpacing Wall Street predictions, and Internet advertising was largely thanked. It earned $373 million, or 25 cents per share, for the three months ended Dec"

How many searchers are being lost by "Get on Australian site Get on Great Britain site" rather than advertise your travel business?

AOL teams with partners to expand search format Tech

Internet Daily
Frank Barnako covers the "new features in AOL's search format"

MSN Removes Beta Tag from Search Site

MSN Removes Beta Tag from Search Site: "MSN Removes Beta Tag from Search Site
By Search Engine Articles and Press Releases - January 20, 2005 "

Dispelling Common SEO Myths

Dispelling Common SEO Myths: "There are only 4 major search databases that matter: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. Their databases power all of the other engines that make a difference. "

The 70/30 Rule of Search

MediaPost Advertising & Media Directory: ""

Gord Hotchkiss, president and CEO of Enquiro, tells it like it is for those who think organic search results and optimisation are to much hassle and not worth bothering with:

"Study after study has shown that about 70 percent of all search engine clicks happen on the organic results. Yet sponsored search continues to take the spotlight and the lion's share of the budget, while for many, organic optimization seems stuck as a little understood and even less trusted tactic only fully utilized by online casinos and porn merchants."

He reckons that most SEO misses the point: "I worry about the lack of motivation to go after the wins that require more work.

We can't move forward as an industry until we start doing the research required to better understand the 70 percent of the market we're missing. The big winners in business have never been the companies that go for the easy wins. They're the ones that figure out how to pick the fruit that's just out of their competition's reach."

ROOMBA CLEANS UP WITH SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

ROOMBA CLEANS UP WITH SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
Case study: "The end result was that Roomba soared to the top of Google's list of most-popular brand names searched in 2004. It placed No. 7 behind Louis Vuitton, Nikon and Tiffany, with the bulk of its traffic coming in during the crucial holiday selling season...

The 2004 Roomba promotions were supported by a tightly integrated advertising program including heavy TV and radio ads supported by an in-depth product Web site and a much broader search term effort. Roomba was a new concept whose novelty had the potential to generate widespread word of mouth. The company knew that the TV and radio ads would drive large numbers of consumers online to research the product before they spent $250 for it at Amazon.com or irobot.com or in retail outlets such as Sears, Home Depot or Hammacher Schlemmer.

Keywords that make sense
"We tried to remain consistent in our branding campaign and then followed it up with keyword search marketing," Ms. Dussault said. "You have to buy the keywords that really make sense.""

Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links

Links and notes about the new rel="nofollow" attribute tag to fight comment spam on blogs are posted in detail on the Totaltravel Google News Blog

More Seth Godin Cluelessness On Search Marketing

searchenginewatch.com

Danny Sullivan discusses a new comment by Seth Godin on SEO and search marketing. Seth asks: "Is there a "search engine industry"?"

Sullivan seems pretty riled by Seth's apparent ignorance stating "Search marketing is more than buying ads -- SEO is the search world's equivalent to public relations. It also doesn't mean that you have to link spam, comment spam or content spam. Content-driven SEO -- I'm writing more about this next week -- is something anyone should be considering."

If Seth is just playing devils advocate to stir up debate and grab attention then he has certainly hit home going by Sullivan's agitation and defense of his position as reknowned SEO specialist.

LookSmart plunges on quarterly outlook

cbs.marketwatch

Looksmart failing to gain market share from Google, Yahoo etc...

Michael Paige & August Cole at CBS.MarketWatch report that: There are concerns about "the strength of LookSmart's distribution partnerships, LookSmart must now work to sign up new advertisers as well, which is likely to negatively impact margins going forward and further delay profitability' ...To be sure, LookSmart Chief Executive David Hills conceded that his company 'did not sufficiently deploy sales resources against new advertisers to achieve the projections issued in late October.'"

Advertisers on Google Are Told to Keep It Proper

The New York Times

Good read, SARAH LEFTON the author asks "Is Google an Internet incarnation of the grammar prescriptivist, insisting that language has rules and that communication without those rules leads to confusion and the decay of civility?"

States that "Google maintains an in-house style guide, which it says is a living document, expanding over time to include neologisms and pop culture references.
'We started seeing the word bling pop up periodically,' Mr. Fischer said. 'At first it raised some questions, but it's made its way into being acceptable. We measure by the standard of, is this going to be clear to people? 'Yada yada yada' is going to be well understood by some and not by others.'
AdWords submissions are screened by an automated system that flags flagrant violations like multiple exclamation points. Ads that clear this hurdle are posted on the Web, but eventually reviewed by editors."

Google still on top of heap

CNET News.com
"Google remains the favorite of search consumers, but Yahoo and Microsoft are closing the gap, according to a new survey...

"Google is the king of customer experience in the search engine industry, but Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves are improving," Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote, said in a statement. "Given the open nature of the Web, as these sites continue to improve the user experience, they will undoubtedly begin to attract more users and improve user loyalty. Obviously this will impact the advertising side of the business."

Keynote said Yahoo and MSN have improved since the last study published in May 2004. Yahoo's better performance is attributed to its expanded local search service and a new search results page. Local search is considered a key indicator of consumer satisfaction, as nearly one in four searchers is not happy with the local results they get. Ask Jeeves also performed better due to changes in its local search service.

The credit for MSN's showing goes to separation of sponsored results from Web search results, Keynote said."

RFID Deployment Continues

RFID Deployment Continues: "Worldwide RFID Radio frequency identification tag revenues will jump more than 800% between 2004 and 2009, according to a new report by In-Stat...

For more information about this topic, the RFID Usage and Trends reportts propels you down the fast-changing timeline as major retailers and consumer goods manufacturers adopt RFID tools for supply chain management.

"

Search Wars About to Begin

emarketer.com
Surely that should be continue or heat up or have they been merely playing till now? "

"eMarketer's new Portal Update: 2005 report previews the coming fight between AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and Google for supremacy in the multi-billion dollar paid-search advertising market"

Online advertising is booming while broadband is finally becoming the main mode of access in the US with providers fighting to get the eyeballs...

The report summary points out the following trends:

"Search Google was the first off with a desktop search product, but all the major portals and search engines will launch their own desktop search product by 2005. In addition to desktop search, look out for personalized search tools, video and multimedia search, local search and mobile search services.
Internet protocol television (IPTV) IPTV has been successfully launched in a number of European and Asian countries, and 2005 will see launches in North America. Microsoft has already cut a deal with broadband access provider SBC to develop an IPTV service and the other portals are also likely to experiment with IPTV, too.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) VoIP grew significantly in the US in 2004, but 2005 portals will begin to offer branded VoIP products of their own. AOL Canada has already launched a VoIP product and a US launch should follow shortly.
Movies and Video-on-Demand (VOD) In the long term, movies — like music — will be primarily delivered via the Internet. With broadband households outnumbering dial-up households, the portals will find it is the right time to experiment with IP movie services. They will either build their own services or partner with established players such as NetFlix, Blockbuster, CinemaNow and MovieLink.
Rich Media Advertising Paid search advertising took the lion's share of online ad spending in 2004, but eMarketer forecasts rich media advertising will grow more quickly than paid search in 2005. The barriers to rich media advertising such as bandwidth constraints and ad formats are falling. Furthermore, in late 2004 Yahoo! launched a specific video search product (in beta) to compliment its other search services. This and other similar services are likely to drive multimedia usage and in turn rich media advertising opportunities.
China and India Three large portals are developing in another part of the world. Sina, Sohu and Netease are the Yahoo!, MSN and AOL of China. Yahoo!, MSN and Google already have a significant presence in China, but 2005 will see the US portals muscle in on the local Chinese market with additional partnerships and acquisitions. China will contain the largest number of Internet users in only a few years and 90% will have broadband. The portals will want a piece of that action. India has been slower to develop its Internet market than China, but the future growth prospects in that country are almost equally as great."

MSN tests new blog, search features

CNET News.com
MSN "is expected to quietly begin testing new features for searching and syndicating blogs, in a nod to the online publishing format."

Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website

Ten : The Extras : Internet Search Engine News

"The Ten Steps We Have Gone Through Are:
Keyword Selection
Content Creation
Site Structure
Optimization
Internal Linking
Human Testing
Submissions
Link Building
Monitoring
The Extras that will give you that little one-up over other ethical SEO's who know their stuff."

Tools - comprehensive list researched, http://www.totaloptimizer.com/ recommended for competitor back link analysis.

Organic SEO undervalued and underused

Why Does Search Engine Marketing Look like a Penny-Farthing Bicycle? : Internet Search Engine News

Greg Jarboe writes "search engine marketing research by iProspect, Enquiro, and JupiterResearch has reported that 60% to 86% of search engine users click on organic results when conducting queries. Only 14% to 40% of search engine users click on paid results...

So, why are companies spending 6.8 times more money on paid placement, when organic search engine optimization can generate 1.5 to 6 times more clicks for the same search terms? Is the cost-benefit ratio of paid placement really 10 to 40 times greater than organic search engine optimization?"

Article concludes "If we’re ever going to shift the ratio of spending on search marketing programs to reflect the ratio of searches by users, we’ll need to start optimizing more “original and unique content” for the major search engines – and news search engines. While the costs are incremental, the benefits are significant.

To pick up on my earlier analogy, the penny farthing bicycle was invented in 1871. It was popular until 1892, when a safer style of bicycle with two wheels of the same size was introduced. We need to develop a more balanced approach to search engine marketing to accelerate our progress, as well."

Apple Spotlight desktop search & desktop search round up

CNET News.com

"Not to miss the search beat reverberating throughout the PC market, Apple Computer chief Steve Jobs touted the company's innovations in desktop search coming with its next Mac OS X upgrade...

Jobs previewed the feature during his speech Tuesday, and said the update is on track to be delivered in the first half of 2005. "And that is going to be long before Longhorn," Jobs said, in an apparent dig at rival Microsoft's much-heralded search technology for the operating system. Longhorn is slated to ship in the second half of 2006.

Spotlight is an indexing engine that tracks every file as it is created, opened or changed, copied or deleted. By constantly tracking all of those files, as well as their complete contents, Spotlight can then quickly and powerfully search the files at a moment's notice. When a person tries to remember where he or she stored travel information for an upcoming vacation, for instance, Spotlight already knows which files contain the words "Jamaica" or "hotel."

Blinkx, a desktop-search software maker, introduced a Mac version of its software this week, in one of the first search applications for the computer.

On the PC, numerous companies including Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, X1 Technologies and Microsoft's MSN have introduced software to scour files on the hard drive. "

Yahoo launch desktop search

Internet Daily

Frank Barnako reports that Yahoo ask on their search blog "'What makes this one special?' and answer: 'Speed. YDS (Yahoo Desktop Search) is really fast,' the company said."

"It's also more comprehensive than alternatives, wrote Bradley Horowitz and Jeremy Zawodny on the Yahoo Weblog. It indexes more than 200 file types, including Microsoft Outlook e-mail, Word files, Adobe PDF documents, and audio and video. Files can be opened or played within the search tool."

Yahoo! Search blog download YAhoo desktop search and post feedback here or on Yahoos message board setup specially for YDS discussion."

Both download and message board pages are down at time of writing.

GuruNet launch Answers.com: Free version

Answers.com Who is... What is...

Mission: "Our super-encyclopedia gives you quick facts— not hundreds of search engine links."

Covers: "Over a million topics, covering people, places, words and names, drawn from reliable dictionaries, encyclopedias, websites, and more. Check out our Directory of content areas and sample topics"

Also claims: "Reliability, not popularity, is the criterion for our answers. Answers.com contains only up-to-date, accurate definitions and explanations from authoritative sources like Houghton-Mifflin, Columbia University Press, Merriam Webster, Inlumen, Investopedia and Who2. In addition, you can trust your children with Answers.com content, eliminating the need to do research in potentially out-of-date or unsafe sites on the Web.

Bigger, broader, more dynamic than any encyclopedia
Our topics range from law to poetry, from finance to nutrition, from culinary terms to mythology. No need to bookmark separate sites for cross-discipline reference."

Download version: "Click AnswersTM (Beta) brings you instant information about any word on your screen, whether you're working in Word, reading your e-mail, or browsing the web."

Search growth

SiteProNews
"Search is bigger today than it was twelve months ago in every respect...

most individuals and businesses rely on the free, organic listings. Those listings will remain an important focus for the search engines as they will continue to provide the primary interactive point between home-user and the search engines. The impact of organic placements will obviously be enhanced by the growth of the search "

Google Adwords: Affiliate Policy Change

"Google's official announcement Google AdWords Announcement 07/01/2005:

Affiliate Policy Change

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising
policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser
experience.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we will only display one ad per search
query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This
way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to
choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank
for given searches.

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.co.uk or anywhere
on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an
inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or
more ads compete under the same URL, we will display the ad with the
highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you are an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify
yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text
will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be
affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match
the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another
site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and
optimise your ads as needed to ensure that they are bringing you the
best results. Please visit our Optimisation Tips page for more
information.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most effective
advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team"

webmasterworld.com/forum main discussion.

Google affliliate post summary

DMNews.com

"Google Limits Affiliate Listings By: Brian Morrissey Senior Editor"

Summary: "Google said it would look for ads that direct to the same Internet address. If two or more direct to the same address, Google will display the one with the highest Ad Rank, which is the bid amount multiplied by the ad's click-through rate. All ads
must direct to the Web address shown in the ad copy. The search company said the policy change, slated to take effect later this month, would improve the user search experience by showing a more diverse set of listings rather than a repetitive list of similar ads from affiliates of the same merchant."

Kevin Lee, CEO of Did-it.com is quoted "The affiliates who are doing arbitrage are going to be heavily impacted.Their only choice is to stop doing it altogether or create landing pages that are sufficiently different."

Overture requires its advertisers to own the Web page to which ads are directed. It lets affiliates set up co-branded Web pages.

Google's new affiliate restrictions do not apply to affiliates that create separate landing pages. For example, a credit card company affiliate could set up a rate-comparison site to lure searchers who type in "MasterCard balance transfer."

The policy will also apply to Google's AdSense publisher network.

Dan the Man's search review and predictions 04 - 05 : Consumer Search

Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Developments With Consumer Search

Dan Sullivan reckons that: "2005 will be a year that we begin thinking widely about 'consumer search,' rather than web search." This encompasses multi-media and multi platform

He sees this area as so important that he has "created a Search Convergence category for our SEW members to help track this type of movement. There are only two major items at the moment: Search Meets TV & Yahoo!, SBC, and Others Partner to Create Home Entertainment Box. But watch how it will grow. (Postscript: Literally minutes after I wrote this, we got another announcement: Convergence: Yahoo! and Microsoft Announce Relationship)

Our Search Types category is more reflective of the changes. It has well over one hundred entries just from September 2004 onward, in subcategories ranging from Books & Print to Multimedia to Travel"

On the YAhoo/ MSN announcment he highlights this in particular "The Yahoo! Digital Home Developer Program will allow consumer electronics companies and other software integrators to make Yahoo! content and services accessible to their Internet-enabled stereos, televisions and other home electronic devices."

Y! Developer Program Micro Site: "Yahoo! Digital Home"
Yahoo! Press Release

Frequent Spidering Doesn't Help Rankings

Jill Whalen writes at searchengineguide "There are people who think that a site that is visited often by the search engine spiders will rank higher for its optimized keyword phrases. But that's simply not true. "

She explains that this is an error of logic. From the premise that frequently spidered sites tend to rank higher then sites spidered less often some have concluded that luring the spiders to web pages more often will result in higher rankings. Jill explains that "a site that is considered "popular" by the search engines may rank higher for its optimized keyword phrases" meaning that the mix of on and off page factors are used to calculate ranking and that how often pages are updated is not a ranking factor.

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Frequent Spidering Doesn't Help Rankings

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