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January 21, 2005

Google Grants Advertisers Greater Control in Adwords.

In a bold move, Google will be providing Adwords API to customers. Currently, AdWords gives its advertisers very little control. Advertisers have no choice in terms of how often an ad will be displayed, when it will be displayed, where it will be displayed, and how much it will even cost. The new policy will allow advertisers to write their own applications controlling delivery, time and price. The creative functions are endless and represent an unprecedented opportunity for advertisers to take control over their accounts.

Silicon Valley Watcher has the full story.

Posted by sesparza on 01/21/05 at 11:40 AM
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Yahoo! and the Spam Guard

The search giant is making its mark on the Great White Way. MediaPost has the story on Yahoo! joining forces with Monty Python's "Spamalot", an adaption of the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" Yahoo's logo will be seen on the signage and on flags carried by the musical's Spam Guard. "Spamalot" starts previews on March 1 in New York. Yahoo! has already purchased all 300 seats and will be having a meet and greet with the cast. March 1 is right in the middle of Search Engine Strategies. I wonder who Yahoo! will be taking out for a night at the theatre.

"Spamalot" was written by Eric Idle and stars David Hyde Pierce, Tim Curry and Hank Azaria. Idle promises will be "as good as or quite likely better than any other show with killer rabbits and a legless knight opening on Broadway this season." Now with better spam blocking.

Posted by Susan Esparza on 01/21/05 at 10:37 AM
See more entries in Fun Stuff, Search Engine Optimization

January 19, 2005

No Follow, No Credit

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch has recently had much to say about the idea of a nofollow attribute to help combat spam in blogs. Today, we learned that all the major engines, in their first cooperative effort in nearly a decade, will be implementing a <rel="nofollow"> attribute. The tag will be recognized by the engines as a link with no value and they will not count it toward their popularity calculations.

Bloggers have long been plagued with spammers filling their comment pages with links. Guestbooks fell victim to the same and it resulted in their almost total devaluation by the search engines. But blogs are often sources of very good information and links so throwing them out altogether would not be a good idea. Hence the nofollow attribute. It's a good move to give bloggers control where they were powerless before. Danny has a detailed explanation of how it will work.

Who knows? It may even cut down on spam.

Posted by sesparza on 01/19/05 at 10:58 AM
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January 5, 2005

Who googles at Google?

Nathan Weinberg at InsideGoogle has assembled a neat look at what search engines the search engine companies use. Using information from VisitorVille Intelligence, Nathan serves up an interesting report on the searching habits of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Google employees are the most loyal--100% use the company engine. Yahoo! employees search via Yahoo! about 69% of the time and Google 30% of the time. 66% of Microsoft employees prefer Google as well, only 20% use MSN Search. I wonder how Microsoft will stack up once they finally take MSN Search out of beta. Will they switch from their current loyalty to Google?

There are several other interesting statistics linked in the article as well, including the top browsers, screen resolutions and OS's used by each company. I'm wondering who the .6% of Firefox-using Microsoft employees are.

Posted by sesparza on 01/ 5/05 at 12:06 PM
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