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October 1, 2007


Search Headlines & Links: October 1, 2007

Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

Headlines & News from Elsewhere:

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on October 1, 2007, 6:14 PM | Permalink


Yahoo Sponsored Listings Allowing Site Blocking

Yahoo announced it is broadening its Traffic Quality Features for its sponsored ads in an email today.

Apparently you are now able to block up to 250 web sites you do not want your ads to appear on Sponsored Search and Content Match, according to the email.

The email stated:

As an advertiser, you want quality traffic—qualified clicks from the users who are most likely to become customers. Our new blocked domains feature, planned for launch later this month, will provide you with greater control of where your ads appear. This is just one of several ways that Yahoo! is working to improve the value of the traffic that we deliver to you.

• Blocked Domains (New!)
Now you can specify websites in our partner distribution network where you don't want your ads to appear.
• Pricing Discounts
You may automatically receive pricing discounts based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from our partner distribution network.
• Click Protection System
We track click and search patterns across many data points to identify clicks that we believe shouldn't be billed to our advertisers. The click protection system generally discards charges from 12 percent to 15 percent of clicks.
• Blocked Continents
Yahoo! automatically excludes traffic from continents other than North America. If global traffic is important to your business, you can opt into this traffic.
• Traffic Quality Center
This site is our home for traffic quality tips, tools and news. This is the place to go, for instance, if you want to learn how to submit click investigation requests.

Posted by Frank Watson on October 1, 2007, 5:07 PM | Permalink


Microsoft Updates Top Ad Algorithm on Live Search

Along with the recent organic ranking improvements Microsoft has made to Live Search, it has also tweaked the algorithm it uses to rank ads. The quality-based ranking algorithm is now less rigid, according to a post on the adCenter blog. This will allow more advertisers to get their ads into one of the top positions above the organic results, which Microsoft refers to as "the mainline."

071001-Live-mainline.jpg

Ads must meet a certain quality score to be considered for the top spots. Among those contenders, the algorithm will consider a combination of click-through rate and maximum bid. Microsoft warns advertisers that ads may move in and out of the mainline position, which may or may not be affected by max bid.

All of our quality-based ranking improvements have been made in the context of the overall search experience -- we will take both the paid and organic listings into account when assessing the overall experience for the searcher, while at the same time endeavoring to balance the needs of the advertiser.

Over time, we will continue to improve the paid search listings on Live Search, specifically focusing on:

* Quality of ads – that the ad copy aligns with offer, landing page and search term

* Quality of advertisers – that the advertiser is offering unique and valuable goods, services or information

* Quality set of overall listings – that the overall result set is unique, extremely relevant, high quality and the best value for the searcher

Google made a similar move to change the way it calculates ad placement for its top ads in AdWords. For Google, the Quality Score continues to be weighted heavily in the calculation, but now the formula uses the advertiser's maximum bid CPC instead of the actual auction-driven CPC to determine which ad will be shown in the top spot.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on October 1, 2007, 4:59 PM | Permalink


Has Change In Google PPC Algorithm Created New Budget Busting Possibilities?

The current cost jumps in cost per clicks at Google may have created a way of pushing a bunch of your less savvy competitors out of the mix. If they have unlimited funds then you are out of luck, but I have noticed that not many people really do have or want to use a "zero sum game" approach.

So how do you do it?

First you want to spend some time looking at your traffic numbers. If you can determine your best hours of lead acquisition - I know all of them are decent etc. - generally there will be a couple of hours a day where you get high clicks and impressions and either don't get the click or it does not convert as well as other hours.

These would be the first things I would turn off. This pushes that traffic to your competitors and pushes them to the top, sending them many more impressions and many more clicks. The CPCs are going to be impacted by improved CTRs - but not like it used to be - so it is still going to cost them more especially when there are a few of them.

Dropping some of your bids during the other hours so that you are at number 3 as opposed to 1 will also give the competitors the higher and more costly spots.

This all works if they have daily and monthly budgets.

The increases will bring them a lot of garbage traffic as well as converting traffic but the increase in volume and cost will sooner or later impact their bids.

Budgets can be busted easily using this method and when that happens you are back on top at a much reduced rate.

If you have any comments on this let me know here.

Posted by Frank Watson on October 1, 2007, 2:19 PM | Permalink


Yahoo Calls In Steve Jobs to Inspire VPs

Instead of the rumored mass firing expected to take place at last week's all-day meeting of top Yahoo execs in Sunnyvale, attendees were treated to real goals and concrete plans from company leadership, and a guest appearance from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to provide an extra burst of inspiration, according to Kara Swisher.

What do you do when you want to inject a little inspiration into a company that needs a lot of it? Do you hold an all-day meeting of top execs where you actually outline specific goals and exhibit better leadership? Do you admit your corporate culture is a little weak and promise to focus on strengthening it? Do you trot out all the senior execs and let them talk about their concrete plans (and, better still, actually prepare them to deliver their spiel with some level of quality)? Do you do some post-lunch touchy-feely group exercises to get people talking?

Best of all, if you really want to send things over the top, do you bring out an icon so beloved as to give goosebumps to explain to the troops how he managed to turn his once-beleaguered and now-soaring company around?

All that and more occurred on Friday at Yahoo HQ as CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker really put on a show that seemed to resonate with the 300-plus top Yahoo executives (vice president and above) gathered there, capped by an appearance by Apple's Steve Jobs, who is apparently now Silicon Valley's equivalent of Oprah.

The company is 76 days into the return of Yang as CEO, following the departure of Terry Semel from that role in June. While Yang had promised a "100-day review," he has since backed off from a concrete timetable. Regardless of the timetable, it's clear that changes are already afoot, and more are planned at Yahoo, the perennial second-place search engine.

According to Swisher, much of the focus of Yang's plans revolve around an "ecosystem" that centers on the interplay of advertisers, publishers, and consumers. Plans include building out Yahoo's ad network, using its "consumer insights" to improve ad targeting, creating a corporate culture open to new ideas, and a more open developer network, Swisher said.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on October 1, 2007, 12:07 PM | Permalink


Yahoo Expands Reach of OneSearch in Europe, Latin America

Yahoo has doubled the reach of its oneSearch mobile search application by partnering with mobile provider Telefonica to make oneSearch the main search service on Telefonica's mobile portals.

OneSearch, a mobile-specific interface and algorithm, was launched in January with the Yahoo Go for Mobile downloadable application, and expanded in March to be available to all WAP-enable devices on the Yahoo Mobile site. OneSearch was launched in Canada and five countries in Europe in May, and to six mobile operators in Asia in June.

Through the Telefonica partnership, OneSearch is now the main search service for users in 15 countries in Europe and Latin America. Global expansion of its mobile search offering is a priority for Yahoo, according to Steve Boom, SVP of broadband & mobile at Yahoo, who posted on the Yodel Anecdotal blog:

We plan to continue this great global momentum for oneSearch. We're working to make oneSearch one finger away through a host of high-quality carrier and device partnerships. As of today, oneSearch is the priority search service for over 200 million mobile consumers through seven major mobile operators in nearly 30 countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Our ultimate goal is to connect one billion mobile users worldwide, so you can count on more to come.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb on October 1, 2007, 11:30 AM | Permalink


Why Index Size is Important

UPDATE: There is an update from Microsoft at the end of this post.

One of the interesting things about Microsoft's new Live search update was the announcement that Microsoft had expanded its index from about 5B pages to about 20B pages, a 4x increase. At some level, the exact index size is not a big issue, unless, your index is simply too small.

Google has stopped reporting its index size, but reportedly has about 24B pages in its index. In my opinion, there is little significance in the difference between 20B and 24B pages in your index, but there is a significant difference between 5B and 24B pages in your index. In short, Microsoft needed to make a move of this type to improve their relevance.

What's at issue is coverage. People increasingly search for a highly specialized set of things on the web, and if you don't have the related sites in the index, you can't return the right result. During the announcement sessions, Microsoft demoed many search queries, but one that illustrates this point particularly well was a search for shelli segal.

A search for this term on Live Search will being up the designer's website. This happens even though the site has a relatively small number of third party web site links to it (106 according to Yahoo).

UPDATE: I got an email from Matt Cutts letting me know that the laundrybyshellisegal.com web site is out of operation, and has been that way for several months. This makes the specific example provided here invalid, but nonetheless the underlying point of this post is unchanged. I have asked Microsoft to provide a new example, and will update this post when I get that.

By comparison, if you search on Google, you quickly discover that Google does not have this web site in its index. Note that many counter examples are possible to show - sites in the Google index that Microsoft has in its index. Ultimately, the point is, you can't return the right result if the site you should be returning for a given search is not in your index.

Update from Justin Osmer of Microsoft:

"We crawled the site and did not receive any redirects, Like many other engines we rely on redirects and other Webmaster Tools help us stay fresh (like our URL removal process) but we know we can't rely on that alone and are still building out as scalable, broad, and updated of an index as we can and are continuing to improve.

As you state, we still stand by our original point and intention that a user won't get the relevant site if it isn't indexed and this particular (poor) example was used to illustrate the point that before we never would of have had it, then we did with the larger index...however, unfortunately in the time we built the index the most relevant site is no longer available and we hadn't re-crawled it yet. We have removed the site from the index now and are returning what we believe to be the most relevant set of results for that query. Our larger index will speed up its crawl frequency in time and situations like this will hopefully be minimized.

You had asked for some additional examples from the presentation Ramez gave so here they are:

Bigger index helping us: search for janet Buxman kurihara.

Core ranking examples:

Hottest temperature in the state of az:

Safeco building address Redmond: