ODP Updates: DMOZ has just performed a long awaiting update to their directory. This occurred on the 24th. If you have made a submission to the ODP in the past, now is the time to check to see if your submission has been included.
Overture Outperforms Google: Since Google AdWords hit the market, we have tracked very carefully the revenue generated per click between AdWords and Overture. Consistently with hundreds of domains, we found that cost per click was higher with AdWords, and the conversion ratio was higher with Overture. It terms of ad budget, it is far more profitable to use Overture as your PPC feeder and use a portion of your budget upgrading your PageRank in Google and optimizing your content for high rankings instead of using AdWords.
Google Shutting Down Premium Ads: As has been rumored for weeks, Google is going to be shutting down their premium ads in the near future. The premium ads are the top two ads on the search results page. They are said to be incorporating the premium ads into AdWords, as they continue to make AdWords more robust.
Stephan Mahaney is reporting that Google is penalizing sites that use JavaScript as a means of hiding URL redirects for affiliate sites. We have not tested this in our lab, but this information was just released and if you are using OnMouseOver variables to hide affiliate links, contact us immediately, so we can test if your site could be served a severe PageRank penalty. According to Mahaney, by denying Google access to your redirect system, you can protect yourself. However, by doing so, denies those pages to be indexed by Google.
Inktomi Active: Jeff Greenfield, of Position Solutions alerted us to a heightened state of Inktomi’s crawler. We have verified this through our logs across multiple domains. About a third of our domains that we track are seeing huge increased visits by Inktomi, as many as five visits per day, and deep crawling as well.
Could this be a sign of Yahoo! beefing up Inktomi’s database for a switch-over soon? We are keeping a very close eye on this.
Refresher: MSN Results
MSN gets their results from the following four sources, listing in order of preference:
1. The top listings are directly negotiated with MSN Search and are premium ad buys. These high ticket listings appear under the header “Featured Sites”.
2. The next level down, “Sponsored Sites” consists of the top three listings from Overture. However, if the top Overture bids for a specific keyword are less than the 16¢ threshold, or if there isn’t enough traffic for that particular search, then MSN simply eliminates the second level Sponsored Sites in their search results.
3. The third level of paid listings are sites taken from the LookSmart directory and identified as “Web Directory Sites”. These are all a flat fee 15¢ per click and paid through LookSmart.
4. Following these listings are the free listings – identified as “Web Pages” and provided by the Inktomi Search Database.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.