Ever since Google’s official acquisition of DoubleClick Perfomics, lots of people in the search community protested about conflicts of interest on Google’s part. They also are worried about their competition, DoubleClick Performics’ Search Marketing, not playing fair. It seems like Google decided to do the right thing. They’re keeping the affiliate marketing side of DoubleClick, and selling off the Search Marketing unit.

This move is definitely good for Google’s reputation. But if Google didn’t sell off Doubleclick’s search marketing department, personally, I think the only “unfair” thing about them would be the fact that DoubleClick’s sales people can persuade potential clients to pick them over another major agency because they are the only search marketing company owned by Google.

But as far as the effectiveness of SEO goes, I don’t think they have a major edge comparing to other agencies. As I’ve stated a year ago,

So…….if you have inside knowlege about Google’s algorithms, spend
a year disecting every little line, what conclusion would you get?
“We need more quality back links with keywords as anchor text!”.

All is fair; SEO isn’t a “secret”, there isn’t much “insider
knowledge”, I think we know what it takes to rank well for specific
keywords for specific sites.

On the subject of “playing fair”, I don’t think Google will give
Performatics special treatment. Google refused “manual manipulation”
when “Miserable Failure” hype came around, it certainly wouldn’t
manually put their clients first for specific keywords.

Google put into effect its new Adwords policy where your display URL has to match the destination URL today. Make sure yours match!

“Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement
Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.”

here’s the WMW thread with more discussion

Barry at SERoundtable noticed video’s embedded in the SERPs in the ads section. This is something that is pretty important because a video is a great way to illicit a emotional response from a potential customer. The connection a user gets from the text ad alone pales in comparison to what a video can provide so I’m really excited to be able to try this with some of my accounts. Imagine opening up a newspaper and being able to see that ad for the golf sale in motion (Copyright!), it would be more likely to get you off your but and into the store. Read more on the story at SER

PS - if anyone can figure out that newspaper video technology, i’ll license my copyright

Just a quick heads up that there are a lot of phishing attempts going around lately in order for someone to gain control of your adwords account. It usually comes in the form of an email asking you to “Update Your Billing Information.” The link in the spoofed email usually redirects you to some fake Google page with the .CN domain extension.

Here is a WebMasterWorld thread on the topic, in which AdwordsAdvisor says to report any emails to this link http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py

This is very similar to the PayPal phishing scams but as Google always says, they will never send you an email link to your account asking you to change anything.

Last week I posted about Google embedding search boxes within search results pages and the issues it could cause by being poorly targeted ads not to mention the ability to bid on competitors SERPs.

Well the NYTimes story today quotes a good spokeswoman as saying that the company has removed the site search box from the SERPs from a couple of unnamed companies.

According to a Google spokeswoman, the company has honored such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

While this is good from a site owners perspective, at least those who feel they are negatively impacted by the search box, it does nothing to help us advertisers from being able to prevent our ads from showing or from preventing our competition from showing their ads. We will keep a close eye on how this story continues to develop but for now you can read more on the story at SEJ and WebMasterWorld

I wonder where they got this demographic info!?

Maybe its just me, but is anyone else getting an error with the Adwords Editor when trying to post to an account?

We’ve all seen the rumors that Google has been testing various new search engine results pages (SERPs) but here is one that I haven’t seen before, a search box embedded within the SERPs. My buddy, Scott, pointed out to me that pulling up the query “Nasa” resulted in an embed search box *see image*.

This actually strikes me as useful because far too many people don’t understand the usefulness of the ’site:’ search command. But while useful to users, this change could have an adverse affect on Adwords performance from an advertiser standpoint. Call me a pessimist but we could potentially see inflated ad impressions (resulting in decreased CTR) from users who are not in the buy cycle. If someone is searching a site, they are probably looking for something specific and not an ad so I’d rather not have my ads shown. Hopefully, if this becomes more widespread, there will be an option to be excluded from showing ads during a users’ embedded search search, which is essentially the ’site:’ command. But given Google’s track record, there won’t be an option for exclusion and we’ll all be defaulted to participate!

I have no idea what is going on lately, and I have confirmed that my friends are experiencing the same problems, but Gmail is letting through tons of spam. Its not like its sneaky spam, its the obvious stuff that any spam filter should catch (Viagra, Cialis, Penis Enlargment, discount software). Most of it is slipping through on my Google Apps accounts, but my @gmail.com address is receiving some spam as well. I’m getting between 5-20 spam messages that don’t get filtered out per day and its annoying.

Hopefully Google will check them selves before I have to switch to *gasp* Hotmail!

Anyone else noticing an increased amount of spam in their Gmail / Google Apps account?

I guess it was only a matter of time if you have a userbase of 49 million. You’re bound to be a target of some form in this cruel internet world. First it was terriorists using Facebook as a recruiting tool, now I’m being bombarded with Facebook spam! Its either spam or the sexiness that oozes out of my Facebook profile has finally been noticed.

Maybe its just my sexiness, after all I’ve had this same problem with my MySpace account being the subject of many scantily clad “friend requests” and pretty girls wanting me to look at their pictures. I guess this is a new 21st century courting ritual, females go after sexy men via their social media profiles. I can dig it.

I guess I’m the only one who has this problem, so I’ll have to tone down my social networking sex appeal.