A WebmasterWorld thread is reporting about search marketing advertisers in United Kingdom have got mails from Yahoo! that lowest bid for some keywords have been decreased to 5P. But there are some keywords whose lowest bid will remain 10p. New prices will take affect from 19th January, 2007. Some are saying that lowest bid of 10p will not change for some 150k terms such as finance terms. Besides United Kingdom there have been changes in bids in Germany, Switzerland and Austria also.
Seems like there is a big problem with Yahoo!'s crawler. Reports coming from Search Engine Watch Forums and WebmasterWorld Forums indicate that Yahoo! Slurp is indexing pages which should not be indexed. It might be that some specific bots are not conforming to robots.txt file. The pages are being indexed at rates which can be very harmful. A member of Search Engine Watch Forums has posted an example:
Chris Silver Smith of SuperPages.com has given some extreme local SEO methods which one can use for SEO of local business. Here are a few tips:
A survey was conducted by JPMorgan which shows that PayPal is more dominating than Google Checkout. The survey was done for knowing the online spending behavior of the consumers. It shows that although Google Checkout has been adopted by 6% consumers in its first year but the adoption rate of PayPal is far ahead at 42%. Again 44% users of PayPal have had 'good' and 'very good' service experiences but only 19% users of Google Checkout experienced such kind of services.
Google has always been stressing the point that it shows neutral results. But with its recent Google Checkout promo in the search results has once again raised the question about Google's neutrality. Search Engine Land has a screen shot of the product search result for "sd cards 128mb" and there is the promo 'See sd cards 128mb results available through Google Checkout ' at bottom of OneBox. This is a disturbing point as the promotion can lead to insecurity among the merchants who do not use Google Checkout. The merchants might be loosing as people might click the Google Checkout icon. Such a promotion is of no use for the searchers and instead if Google really cares for the users than why doesn't it promote organizations that works in the interest of the online merchants? Recently, it dropped the links of its rival map services and now this promotion.A beforehand discussion would have helped the company to get feedback of the users about their concerns and help retain their trust on Google.
Google has updated its AdSense policies which have only gotten more sterner for the publishers. Publishers will get affected a lot by this change.
There was a time when search ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and others was a powerful marketing tool for small and medium online retailers to directly reach their customers and make large and quick bucks. But now the story has changed drastically with coming of big brands such as Best Buy Co, Zale Corp and many more who are investing large bucks in search ads. This has led online buyers to the big companies which they know instead of clicking on ads and purchasing from small and unknown retailers. The price per click on the search ads have gone by 31% in a year. The result is small merchants are going back to the traditional source of advertising – print and radio. They are buying less keywords and phrases and trying out ads on sites like YouTube, MySpace besides giving ads on blogs and niche shopping sites. But for now Google and Yahoo! are not worried as the big brands are pouring enough money in search making up for loss suffered from small merchants.
SEO industry is one of the most vibrant and funny industry of the world. The industry becomes more humorous when it gets a rock song
whose lyrics goes like this.
built this site for the world to see
Content and Links are found in plenty
Crawl my site everyday and night
Come on spider take a look at me
The recent abuse of the social networking site, Orkut, of Google created lot of uproar in the country. Tech2 reports this has led to Google to build a team that will work in close tandem with Delhi Cyber crime investigation cell for avoiding such kind of abuse of Orkut by anyone.
Aaron Shear has made a very interesting observation about the beliefs and behaviors of various SEOs belonging to four countries United Kingdom, Australia, France and Germany.
SEOs of United Kingdom come across as very easy going and friendly people to work with. You can clinch a deal with them with a well created presentation and your project will be worked upon at great pace. But at the same time they trust anyone very easily and tend to harm themselves.
@pagetraffic
