Smart Keywords

Okay it is getting very close THE DAY YAHOO MORPHS INTO GOOGLE.
I got an email – see below – telling about coming changes as early as December (had thought this was slated for the end of Q1)… the nightmare begins.

Guess bid gaping goes into the historical references about paid search now!!!

As you will soon notice when you log into your Sponsored Search
account, we are making some important changes to your Manage Bids
page.

In early December 2006, some of the information on the Manage Bids
page will no longer be available. We will be removing the “Top 5 Max
Bids,” “Position” and “Your Cost” columns from the current account
interface. The View Bids tool will also be removed.

These columns will be replaced with two new columns of data:

Estimated Average Position
This displays an estimate of the average position your listing may
achieve, based on your bid and the current bids of other advertisers.

Bid Range for Top Positions
This displays the current range of bids other advertisers are willing
to pay for the positions at the top of the search results page.

To learn why we’ve made these changes and more, please see our FAQs.

Funny how those staid financial publications seem to lag on internet stories but are perfect at forecasting ‘brick and mortar’ actions.

The Economist just got around to writing about click fraud.

Talking about the $30 clicks gets attention but this is something they are very late on.

If you have ever watched Mad Money you have to love Jim Cramer. I send out a big BooYah for his recent statements about the Google pruchase of YouTube.

Most analysts seem to think it is the start of the demise of Google, but Cramer and I agree (I have two kids 10 and 14 who both use YouTube, MySpace and Google) that you need only look at what kids are doing to see the potential here.

Nothing like buying your future spenders’ favorite toys and branding Google into their subconscious. This group represents a huge portion of online spending whether directly or by the influence of their endless pleas of “Please MOM’.

I have always enjoyed Cramer’s TV show – now I am going to have to go buy his book. Wonder what he thought of Baidu a year ago when I was telling my friends to grab it at $28… it broke $108 today!!!

Seems the Koreans do not like people making money from selling online gaming currencies to other gamers.

An IT Week article details this and says that as much as $900 million is being spent on this in Korea. That is one hell of a market! Makes one want to start playing pong again.

Okay Danny I signed up. This should be another great venture. I like the idea of the newspaper of record for search. You are going to have to chase down a lot of leads – both real and imaginary.

But with your initial team of Barrry Schwartz and Chris Sherman you start with two excellent journalists – in the true sense of the term.

Search Engine Land should be very well received and I am figuring you have 25,000 or more sign ups before it even launches. That should be a story in and of itself.

I will pass along anything I hear to you guys to run down!

Seems the job-destroying memo (sorry mission statement) is not restricted to the movies. In a move reminiscent of “Jerry McGuire” a senior Yahoo employee wrote a memo basically stating the company need to be rejuvenated.

The leaking of it and the response has been very interesting. The best critiques so far have been over at John Battelle’s blog.

Anyone looking for solid experienced employees should be waiting outside the Yahoo offices – they could be flooding the employment market very soon!

I had not been to the Google Webmaster help section in awhile and found the new tools they are offering to be very helpful.

You can check if your site is indexed and once you have added a metatag to the site so Google knows you have access to the server for the site they will let you know what erros exist and help you improve how the spiders go through your pages.

I had done this quite some time ago but was impressed by how much they have improved the diagnostics. Well worth stopping by here.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The other conversation I had with Google this week was regarding inactivating keyowrds in our PPC account. Seems this is another bones of contention of late and I am fast seeing it become the Google Grinch for this holiday season.

Like everything Google makes decisions on in AdWords the numbers are taken from Google search only.

Our site had not been penalized by the Quality Score update recently – not surprised as each keyword for this account has its own landing page with definition and other appropriate content. True there are a couple of ads – but all publishers need income – and we were not arbitraging so much as increasing the quality of the traffic for our advertisers. (Doesn’t that sound positive).

According to the Google person I spoke with exact and phrase match numbers have more impact – so I guess they are breaking these numbers out in the background similar to the bucket of broad keywords that include some that used to get permanently pulled from what words were given traffic.

Say I am advertising for car parts and my numbers tanked for Ford car parts and Mercedes car parts but did well for Chevy and BMW – in the past the bad performers would be pulled from the impression rotation even without your knowledge.

Now broad match is not separated and thus there can be words in the mix that should be negatived out that are impacting what terms are forced to raise bids.

They are not arbitrarily making changes to minimum bids, I was told, but this is based on the impact of disabled terms etc.

I will be delving into this a little deeper and keep you informed.

I ahd a conversation with one of the senior guys at Google about one of our sites finding its way prominently into the Supplemental listings. In the old days this was usually the start of your site exiting the Google database all together.

Not so anymore, according to this Google employee. The push to grow a secondary database that can hold 100 billion documents will be needed for the new infrastructure of the burgeoning new web – yeah that Web 2.0 everyone is discussing these days – obviously a little more to it than the ‘mumbo jumbo’ I had thought a lot of the talk was.

Yeah I know the web is evolving. Yeah I know new rich media and other changes are part of this new ‘web’. That Google was doing something in the background to adapt to these moves is logical – and now partially mentioned in public.

Eventually all sites will be migrated over to this database – so expect to see sites slipping more to the Supplemental listings.

Somehow those sites will be able to appear for search terms – hey Google can do anything right.

I really enjoyed the conversation and actually learned or let’s say saw in another light a bunch of things I had long stored in the brain’s attic.

Title tags do not have weighting for your PR and thus where you appear in the organic results – I was told! I liked that because though it is correct they impact what keywords you can be listed for – they do not impact the position. Links are the major factor on your PR and Google’s PR impacts where you end up on the organic rankings.

If you follow this out then the anchor text and title tags will contribute to the words your site has in its database entry but the PR of the links and I imagine (was not told this directly) the actual anchor text used will create scales of PR for words on any page.

This is going to be something I will test and try and learn more on now.

I got the Yahoo email today about Panama and was surprised to see endorsements from Andrew Goodman and Andy Beal…. they could have added Andy Hagans, Andy Atkins-Krüger, Andy Mindel, Andy Bourland… the list could have been extensive but that the two who did get quoted are prominent search personalities…

Hey, I too think Panama is a great improvement and has the scope to push the Yahoo interface to the top of the pile.

They really are trying to make this the best PPC interface out there. The help sections are easy to read and follow, the ability to upload third party bulk upload sheets and have them converted to the Yahoo format is huge.

Congrats Yahoo! you have finally killed ‘the blob’.