Category: Google

I read this in the Washington Post this morning; that Yahoo, in a three week test, will be showing Google AdWords ads in about 3% of their searches. This is big news, but is it good news or bad news?

I have to say I think that it is bad news. Google owns such as large portion of the search engine marketing market that to expand their holdings onto Yahoo, which really had a good new program, means to the average business that you will simply pay more per click.

Competition is good in a marketplace; offers alternatives, typically keeps prices lower, and keep competitors sharper as they work to garner market support. Moving AdWords onto the Yahoo platform can only mean that you as an advertiser will now pay more money for Yahoo clicks.

Yahoo had an excellent pay per click product and different search demographics which gave advertisers real differences and an alternative to AdWords. Now, when you advertise on Yahoo, you get Yahoo AdWords! I do say this tongue in cheek now, because remember this is a limited test, and it is not a done deal, but it does not bode well for people who are currently advertising on Yahoo.

What it does appear to me however is that with Yahoo and Google cozying up, a merger there may be in order creating GoogleY! Wouldn’t that just smack Microsoft in the face? First Microsoft bids too low to move their advertising onto AOL – which really killed their fledgling pay per click program several years ago and now they are letting Yahoo slip through their fingers. A better plan would be to up the ante for Yahoo and then become a real contender to Google searches and advertising.

Yahoo! Well really Googlehoo!, The Wicked Witch is dead. Google has just announced that it has killed the Supplemental Index.

Google’s Supplemental Index has previously been affectionately known as “Google Hell” and if your site arrived there, there was simply no getting out. There were many tips on the Web that had been widely circulated on how to get out, but the reality was that short of changing the content on every page and even changing your page name and starting all over, you were stuck.

Now, Google has announced in their Search Blog that they have killed the Supplemental Index. In about July this past year Google had dropped the additional descriptor “Supplemental Index” next to search queries which had been the bain of all professional webmasters. After that change, we could only guess by poor website performance if a site had landed in “Google Hell”.

Google has now stated:

“…From a user perspective, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.”

Google has stated that this change has been due to new technology and their unabashed “amazing technical feats” allowing a full search of the entire index for every search query.

So… ding, dong, the Wicked Witch is finally dead! Good Riddance!

This is Google’s new brainchild that is in testing – knol – or as they call it “unit of knowledge”. Currently this new roll out is in testing and is being done by invitation only. The bottom line is that Google is wanting authors who are experts on specific topics to write a piece and then for a community, like Wikipedia, to interact with the information.

It creates a mini-web page for each topic. Clearly this will be searchable and will give authors on good topics excellent exposure and even a portion of ad proceeds. You can click my post title to read the full information about this new interactive tool from the Google Search blog.

Here is an image of a Knol on insomnia from the Google site. Looks like a very slick version of Wikipedia.

May personal take on this is that this could be very good for a business. Instead of posting articles on various sites as link bait, why not have one really great page that Google will create and that all you have to do is moderate. Also as this is Google, remember, it will certainly be included in the SERPs in a big way. This could be an extraordinary degree of exposure for experts and consultants in their industry.

I follow SitePro News. This is super e-newsletter. You can get the feed by clicking our post title. In the recent newsletter a very savvy author was speaking about the algorithm change on Google that just started this Thursday.

In the article, he mentions that Google has created a trust factor that is placing site’s with older domains preferentially above new domains. He also mentions changes in the weighting of PageRank shown on the green bar on the Google Toolbar or within the Google Sitemap control panel and also inbound links.

Clearly in the next several days we will continue to see a shakedown and mix up in the index. Are all of these changes good things? Well to scrap the PageRank indicator in the Google Toolbar is a good thing. PageRank has been an area that can be gamed by search engine optimizers and so to get rid of that I personally feel is a good thing. It appears that TrustRank may be the next big factor and this may be a better indicator of real value of a site and therefor a strong indicator of good organic search placement.

Although this newsletter is not online yet on the SitePro News site, when it is in the next several days, it is a must read. The title is “Google Algorithm Update Analysis” and is written by Dave Davies. You may not agree with everything that he has to say, but if you have been following the various Google patent disclosures over the last several months to one year, what he says makes sense based on the technology that Google has been actively patented.

From my viewpoint all of this information just reaffirms that excellent and unique content on your website is important. If you take time to create and build a great site, it should not stop when you launch, new content, a blog, an e-newsletter that are done on a regular basis build new content and authority over time.

There is no quick fix for great organic site placement on search engines, but once it is achieved, you have hit a tipping point and your business and market presence increases dramatically because of it. So specifically working to improve organic placement is crucial for all growing businesses.