Yahoo! Sponsored: Relevancy Smack-down

The time of coasting thru Yahoo! Sponsored is over. Dealing the one-two punch to the Overture schematic they have announced a date for the implementation of their new quality algorithm we all knew was coming, February 5th, 2007. Yahoo! Sponsored is adopting a similar strategy as Google AdWords and will start using the quality and relevancy of the ad’s to determine ad position and therefore bid price. Here is an excerpt from the announcement: Both bid amount and ad quality will determine an ad’s rank in search results beginning February 5, 2007. This will replace the current method, in which ads are ranked by bid amount only (bid-to-position). This is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding practices and more on the...

Wikipedia: Shortsighted Cowardice and Alternatives to Nofollow

In what is receiving positive and negative attention, Wikipedia is nofollowing all of their external links. There is legitimate reason for the community frowning upon this choice. Essentially, the death of the link is coming more rapidly that we thought. In the eyes of webmasters, the net impact of losing valuable link structures is far less tangible than the immediate impact of averting link spam. However, the link is the most key element to content relationships and search engine algorithms. Without it, our most important online application – the search engine – fails. Perhaps most disheartening is the death of community authority linking. Wikipedia has cowered out of the community and chosen a cheap fix over innovation. If Wikipedia cannot create a...

Doing Google AdWords’ Homework

So an interesting thing happened the other day on the way to cornering the market on a keyword in Google AdWords. The situation began like this: I had been watching the sponsored scene for a product keyword for one of our clients for about 3 months. All of my search queries for the term during that time resulted in perhaps 3-4 sponsored results appearing along side the organic results. It was the prefect opportunity to take advantage of a very low competitive market on a high profit margin item which our client sells. I convinced the client that the time was right to enter into this particular keyword market and they agreed. So I set off to do my keyword discovery; In addition to utilizing our own research methodologies I also incorporated the tools that Google...

We Can’t Fill Your Order or Give You A Refund

It is rare (actually, this is tied into the only 1 other time I have ever issued a warning about a vendor on this site) that I actually take the time to point out an online vendor whose errors are grave enough to warrant boycott. Some of this is the fear of reprisal, but the majority of this comes from working at a web-based company and knowing how common it is for customers to just get confused when really no problem exists at all. With Registerfly, this is not the case. My ordeal began over a month and a half ago when I sought to register 10 domains on my own behalf. The registrations were for 2 years each and the order came to about $140. Registerfly had always been slower than the other registrars I normally used, but the price was right, so I was not...

Globalwarming Awareness2007 : Spelling Correction and Time-To-Index

While there is a lot of antipathy towards search engine optimization competitions such as the latest world seo championships with the globalwarming awareness2007 keywords, one of the few things they really offer in the way of quality information is the different patterns of indexing by the search engines and the related services each search engine provides. For example, each of the major 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) offer some level of keyword spelling correction. In the case of this particular competition, you can see that MSN actually offers the best keyword correction, Yahoo the second best and Google the worst. Google is unable to determine the obvious joining of 4 words into two. While Google often has accurate mispelling suggestions, it appears the search...