Thursday, September 28, 2006
Monday, September 18, 2006
Google: AdWords Editor (Beta) open to the Public
AdWords Editor is Google's free, downloadable account management application. They have now released this to the public in beta form. Previously it was restricted to select AdWords clients.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Webmaster Central Blog: Listen in - Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox talk search
Webmaster Central Blog: Listen in - Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox talk search:
"And if you missed last week's show, check out the podcast. Danny Sullivan and I explained that everything you need to know about search marketing, you can learn by watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you heard the show and are worried about Danny's favorite espresso machine shop, don't be. They're doing OK after all."
You know, Vanessa Fox kind of looks like Buffy. I can totally see the resemblance!
"And if you missed last week's show, check out the podcast. Danny Sullivan and I explained that everything you need to know about search marketing, you can learn by watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you heard the show and are worried about Danny's favorite espresso machine shop, don't be. They're doing OK after all."
You know, Vanessa Fox kind of looks like Buffy. I can totally see the resemblance!
Search Bugs At Yahoo & Google
Search Bugs At Yahoo & Google: "Search Bugs At Yahoo & Google
In the past twenty-four hours I have discovered and documented four different bugs or weird occurrences at both Yahoo and Google. I will cover the four bugs, include adult ads displaying in Google and Yahoo's contextual programs, Yahoo's contextual ads not displaying ads at all, Google's site operator not functioning properly and Google's AdWords statistics not showing the right data.
In the past twenty-four hours I have discovered and documented four different bugs or weird occurrences at both Yahoo and Google. I will cover the four bugs, include adult ads displaying in Google and Yahoo's contextual programs, Yahoo's contextual ads not displaying ads at all, Google's site operator not functioning properly and Google's AdWords statistics not showing the right data.
(1) The first I named Adult Ads Displayed Within Google's AdSense Program? but it actually affects Yahoo as well. Basically, some people found Google AdSense ads that displayed adult oriented content, something that should not happen on AdSense. But what was amusing, was that after I posted this article, people noticed that when the Yahoo Publisher Network ads showed up, they were showing adult ads as well.
(2) If you were not able to load the ads in example one, then it may be because the Yahoo Publisher Network Ads Still Have Accessibility Issues, even after I reported it last Friday. Basically, some ISPs are not able to resolve the DNS information that hosts those Yahoo ads. This was first documented on August 31st, then acknowledged by a Yahoo representative on September 7th and is still an issue today.
(3) The next issue is that Google's Site Operator Shows Sites Off Domain. It does, I have seen screen captures myself, showing someone searching using the site: command and Google returning results from sites off of that domain. I have pictures and more details at the Search Engine Roundtable.(4) The final bug I found today was that AdWords Statistics Mixing the Search & Content Network. So you are an advertiser, you set a campaign to only run on Google's content network, but for some reason, your stats in AdWords shows impressions and clicks for that campaign in the search network. This bug is confirmed by Google but stated as a small tiny problem.
There you go, four bugs documented in the past twenty-four hours.
Posted by Barry Schwartz on Sep. 12, 2006 | Permalink"GOODROI Internet Marketing » One reason why new sites have a hard time ranking
GOODROI Internet Marketing » One reason why new sites have a hard time ranking:
"INCUMBENCY
The sites that currently are in the top rankings have the benefit of being the incumbents and it is a huge benefit. These incumbent sites gain hundreds of free links from scrapers.
Scrapers sites put up massive amounts of auto-generated content and wrap adsense around it. Where do these scraper sites get this content? They simply republish the serps for thousands of keywords. Thus the link and snippet for the top ranking sites gets republished on hundreds if not thousands of scraper sites.
I know what you are thinking, but Greg these scraper sites have very little link popularity. It is true that they only pass a little link popularity but a little link popularity from 500 or 1000 sites is some real nice link juice. And new sites do not have any of this link juice."
"INCUMBENCY
The sites that currently are in the top rankings have the benefit of being the incumbents and it is a huge benefit. These incumbent sites gain hundreds of free links from scrapers.
Scrapers sites put up massive amounts of auto-generated content and wrap adsense around it. Where do these scraper sites get this content? They simply republish the serps for thousands of keywords. Thus the link and snippet for the top ranking sites gets republished on hundreds if not thousands of scraper sites.
I know what you are thinking, but Greg these scraper sites have very little link popularity. It is true that they only pass a little link popularity but a little link popularity from 500 or 1000 sites is some real nice link juice. And new sites do not have any of this link juice."
I have found a very similiar situation with the online directories, which pretty much do the same thing as the scrapers. My clients are in the medical field so the directories are just bought lists of doctors compiled into data directory lists with AdSense spread all over them.
It just complicates the seniority factor and the mass publication of a lot of data causes headaches when trying to do focused local SEO for dentists and orthodontists who are small one city shops. My client base is somewhere around 2000 and those directories get frustrating fast.
TrackbackLive Search Launch!
Live Search Launch! » Ironvine Search Marketing
Microsoft AdCenter letter announcing the launch of Live Search and the migration of MSN Search to Live Search over the next couple of days.
Microsoft AdCenter letter announcing the launch of Live Search and the migration of MSN Search to Live Search over the next couple of days.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
GeoTargeted AdWords Preview Tool
Inside AdWords blog has announced a new feature that allows advertisers to see how their ads appear locally or based on a specific set of geographic criteria.
Go to www.google.com/adpreview and type in your keyword phrase. If you want to add geo-specific criteria, use the following formulas.
To define the country enter &gl=[Two Letter Country Code Here]
To define the region enter &gr=[region code here]
You can also define city, latitude and longitude, postal code and DMA.
More details at the AdWords Help Center and further explained on the Inside AdWords Blog.
Go to www.google.com/adpreview and type in your keyword phrase. If you want to add geo-specific criteria, use the following formulas.
To define the country enter &gl=[Two Letter Country Code Here]
To define the region enter &gr=[region code here]
You can also define city, latitude and longitude, postal code and DMA.
More details at the AdWords Help Center and further explained on the Inside AdWords Blog.
Live Goes Live
Both Microsoft Windows Live Search and Live Local have dropped their "Beta" labels. According to Microsoft they are also migrating MSN users to the Live Search as well.
Personally I haven't been too impressed by Live.com. I tried it out initially when it was released at the alpha/beta signups. The Hotmail interface upgrade was decent, if not a poor replica of Gmail. It was an improvement at least.
I still find there are a lot of issues with Live.com. Examples: I just logged in on 2 machines to my account to test it out. I tried to Add Content > My Content and it locks the process at Loading... when trying to add. Oh and don't bother trying to use it with FireFox2 Beta, it wont even load your personalized page content. In general it is very slow as well. I feel for the MSN users on 56k dialup.
Personally I haven't been too impressed by Live.com. I tried it out initially when it was released at the alpha/beta signups. The Hotmail interface upgrade was decent, if not a poor replica of Gmail. It was an improvement at least.
I still find there are a lot of issues with Live.com. Examples: I just logged in on 2 machines to my account to test it out. I tried to Add Content > My Content and it locks the process at Loading... when trying to add. Oh and don't bother trying to use it with FireFox2 Beta, it wont even load your personalized page content. In general it is very slow as well. I feel for the MSN users on 56k dialup.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Google Cache Date
Google Sitelinks
Here is some further information posted today from the SEW Blog Highlights about Google Sitelinks:
Google Sitelinks: New Name For Those Links Under The Top Listings
Last year, people started to notice that Google began showing "subtopic" or "subcategory" links below their listing, if they were the first in a Google search. Now, Google's finally confirmed the change as a permanent feature and given it a name: sitelinks.
From: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060424-100933
Social Patterns dug into this a bit more. He determines they are "likely determined by traffic patterns." His findings in short:
Google snippet links do not return links outside of the home domain.
Google snippet links do not have to be from a text link, it can be an image link or even a javascript link.
Google snippet link text can be determined from an image's alt text.
Google snippet links can be subdomains of the home domain.
Google snippet links are not determined by PageRank.
Google snippet links are displayed for the top result for a "brand" search or "domain" search. (For example, "zappos" and "zappos shoes")
Google Supplemental Search Link Display
Recently I have noticed that Google results for some large/popular searches are displaying supplemental links below the description.
A couple quick search examples are "Sesame" and "WordPress"
Sesame Workshop
Sesame Workshop - The non-profit educational organization behind Sesame Street and so much more...
www.sesameworkshop.org/ - 16k - Sep 9, 2006 -Cached - Similar pages
WordPress
A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
wordpress.org/ - 7k -Cached - Similar pages
Going to do some more research and see if I can find out where these are created, or if it is only for a select group of "special" web sites. It seems similar to the Google Co-Op listing where you can have subscribed links like the one I created for Sesame Communications Co-Op here.
Here is a semi vague reference to Sitelinks on the Google Webmaster Help pages. It looks like this is what is happening, and it is currently all automated. Hm...
A couple quick search examples are "Sesame" and "WordPress"
Sesame Workshop
Sesame Workshop - The non-profit educational organization behind Sesame Street and so much more...
www.sesameworkshop.org/ - 16k - Sep 9, 2006 -
Games & More - http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/
Games - http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/games/
Elmo's World - http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/elmosworld/
Stories - http://www.sesameworkshop.org/sesamestreet/stories/
More results from www.sesameworkshop.org »
WordPress
A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
wordpress.org/ - 7k -
Download - http://wordpress.org/download/
Support - http://wordpress.org/support/
Hosting - http://wordpress.org/hosting/
What is WordPress? - http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_Word...
More results from wordpress.org »
Going to do some more research and see if I can find out where these are created, or if it is only for a select group of "special" web sites. It seems similar to the Google Co-Op listing where you can have subscribed links like the one I created for Sesame Communications Co-Op here.
Here is a semi vague reference to Sitelinks on the Google Webmaster Help pages. It looks like this is what is happening, and it is currently all automated. Hm...
Friday, September 08, 2006
Microsoft Live Writer
This is a test post from the Microsoft Live Writer Beta application. It is a stand alone program that seemingly connects with any weblog to create posts then upload them.
Apparently it has issues uploading to Blogger, and the FTP uploading of images doesn't work correctly either.
Google's Domain Apps
It looks like my test with Google's Web Site creator tool worked. I came back from my vacation and the web site I created had been indexed within 5 days. Perhaps blogging the link helped as well, who knows! That will take a bit more research. I will experiment with adding more pages and see if they get indexed as well. Dentistry for Kids is the web site that I set up to test and play with. It explains all about Pediatric Dentistry. I will add some content with unindexed words as a sample and see how it works too.
Sesame Elite Search
I am very happy to share a new page on the Sesame Design web site. This is my direct service and I enjoy every minute of it.
Sesame Elite Search is a specialized offering directly focused to online marketing. This service provides orthodontists and dentists with a direct way to move their practice beyond the competition to reach patients actively looking for their services.
Sesame Elite Search sends prospective patients directly to your web site from a custom ad on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.
What you get with Sesame Elite Search:
-Complimentary initial consultation of your online marketing needs
-Free price quote and list of the HOT keywords for your region/specialization
-Custom ad creation and frequent monitoring of your ad’s results
-Increased online visibility — patients can find you easier
-Monthly performance reports
Sesame Elite Search is a specialized offering directly focused to online marketing. This service provides orthodontists and dentists with a direct way to move their practice beyond the competition to reach patients actively looking for their services.
Sesame Elite Search sends prospective patients directly to your web site from a custom ad on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN.What you get with Sesame Elite Search:
-Complimentary initial consultation of your online marketing needs
-Free price quote and list of the HOT keywords for your region/specialization
-Custom ad creation and frequent monitoring of your ad’s results
-Increased online visibility — patients can find you easier
-Monthly performance reports
WordPress Plugins
I have been playing with WordPress as the corporate directive is to have a password protected area to disucss within the design team. Also, we need to have the option to use CODE or PRE blocks which unfortunately Blogger does not have.
WordPress has the option to add the plugins needed, like the password protected site and the code blocks. Coffee2Code has some good plugins.
I set up a blog to test and experiment with on my parent domain http://www.ironvine.com/blog/.
WordPress uses PHP technology and a MySQL database, which I am not sure that I like. I would much rather prefer an XML file which is much more transportable. Something similar to the Sesame News RSS Feed.
For now I will most likely be keeping my main blog here and using that one as reference.
WordPress has the option to add the plugins needed, like the password protected site and the code blocks. Coffee2Code has some good plugins.
I set up a blog to test and experiment with on my parent domain http://www.ironvine.com/blog/.
WordPress uses PHP technology and a MySQL database, which I am not sure that I like. I would much rather prefer an XML file which is much more transportable. Something similar to the Sesame News RSS Feed.
For now I will most likely be keeping my main blog here and using that one as reference.
