Search Engine Marketing and PPC Management News & Info

Amazon.com blackouts hits Christmas shopping

Amazon.com was hit by periodic outages and slowdowns yesterday, but no one's quite sure why
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Firefox users ignore online ads

Internet Explorer users are at least four times as likely to click on Web ads than Firefox users, according to latest statistics
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Lycos anti-spam campaign bites the dust

The zombie army created by Lycos screensavers to attack spammers' Web sites has been dismantled
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Accoona Launches, But Isn't Ready for Prime Time

New search engine Accoona launched with great fanfare last night, but hold the applause. It's a promising start, but testing shows Accoona isn't yet ready to play ball in the big leagues.
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The Future of the Internet, Eleven Years Ago

It seems hard to imagine, but the Internet was still a wild frontier just a decade ago. But at a leading industry conference of the time a group of seers offered some remarkably prescient predictions of what was to come.
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Amazon unavailable for holiday shopping madness

Things are really complicated
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Internet fraud is easy, says judge...

...as he sentences eBay UK fraudster
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Apple threatens iTunes.co.uk owner

Something rotten in the digital music world
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Akamai and C&W kiss and make up

Patent dispute resolved
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Cost Per Click Down Over Thanksgiving Weekend

Some interesting stats in this MediaPost article.
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WebSourced's KeywordRanking Exclusive AD TECH Conference Sponsor

Websourced's KeywordRanking.com will be the exclusive platinum conference sponsor for AD:TECH San Francisco - April 25-27th 2005. After the success of the New York show, we decided that AD:TECH should be on our list of conferences to sponsor and so we
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Yahoo Branded DVD Player

A couple of months back, we reported on new Yahoo licensed merchandise. Gary Price is seeing it in the stores. With YAHOO!'s versatile, portable Micro DVD Player, you can enjoy your favorite movies anywhere there is a television, from kitchen, to offic
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Google's Picasa Defaced

Zone H reports that Google's Picasa was subjected to a hijack over the weekend.
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Search Engines NOT a Threat to SEO

Shari Thurow manages to live-up to the ClickZ mandate of "fluffy articles" perfectly in her latest article. First, Ask Jeeves and Lycos did not "independently announce" they were going to offer SEO services. Second, legitimate SEOs need not worry about
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Energis appoints new CFO

If he wants to get on, he better get a hat
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'Clicks and bricks' trick tempts window shoppers

'Retail theatre' or gimmick - you decide
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Amazon.com blackouts hit Christmas shopping

Amazon.com was hit by periodic outages and slowdowns yesterday, but no one's quite sure why
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Mystery surrounds Web patents acquisition

Commerce One's Web services patents have been auctioned off for over $15m, but the identity of the new owner is still unknown, as are their intentions
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Kazaa's spying potential revealed

Witnesses in Australia's Federal Court have have said the the software 'could have been designed to spy on users'
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Cambridge wireless network to close

New one due to be built though
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Trojan poses as fake Lycos screensaver

The fallout from Lycos' anti-spam campaign continues with hackers using it to try and trick email users with a password-stealing Trojan
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Mystery bidder snaps up Commerce One patents

Someone pays $15.5m
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V Two One told to pull 'UK's cheapest ISP' claim

ISP stands firm
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Musicians 'unconcerned' about file sharing

72 per cent say internet has helped sales
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Yahoo Aims to Move Beyond PC

Yahoo is coming to your mobile in a big way !

Yahoo said Monday that it had acquired WUF Networks Inc., a small start-up whose technology aims to let consumers move their songs, photos and other digital content from their computers to devices such as mobile phones.

The deal underscores Yahoo's strategy of trying to make its dozens of services — including digital music, instant messaging and streaming video — more widely available not just on personal computers but also on any device connected to the Internet.

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Mirago Expand In Europe - 7 New Country Specific Indexes

Mirago have launched 7 new country indexes in Europe increasing thier portfolio to 11, the new country sites/indexes are:

• Italy
• Denmark
• Sweden
• Norway
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• Switzerland

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Keyword Selection by Mathematical Formula?

Good foundational article regarding keyword selection. The pearl I think is
the formula that is used to calculate the worth of certain keywords. It would be interesting
to know if anyone else has developed a similar formula.

Nick W: The formula is on page 2

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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BlogEthics.org - Calacanis in Blog Spam Scandal

Jason Calacanis is in a bit of hot water over his newly formed blogethics.org - A kind of self appointed watchdog for bloggers (perish the thought..)

Turns out that some cheeky bugger is running a bot making blog spam comments about his latest pet hates Womma and BzzAgent

It's kiiler funny, but i cant beleive it's him so fair play eh? lol...

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Doubleclick Ditches SiteAdvance - Partners with Omniture

Doubleclick are to drop SiteAdvance their web analytics solution completely, once customes have migrated to the Omniture's SiteCatalyst as part of the new partnership between the two firms.

Jupiters Eric Peterson had this to say:

My feeling is that while many talk about the idea of a "360 degree view of the customer" integrating advertising and marketing with CRM and analytics, few actually deliver on the promise. If Omniture and DoubleClick are successful in this partnership, and if Omniture is able to get a critical mass of existing DoubleClick customers to migrate instead of going to RFP and looking at established commerce offerings from Coremetrics, Fireclick or WebSideStory, this partnership could be another big step towards the promise of the universal marketing interface.

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Explorer users 4x more likely to click ads than Firefox users

No shit sherlock...

On the basis that Firefox users are clearly superior beings of vast intellect and thus more likely to use the tools provided than their cranially challenged cousins the IE users, I'd say it was a no brainer that less ads are clicked by the FF boys and girls...

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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NYT up for Major Redesign Next Year - Leaked Email

Steve at MP in the threadlink above has the scoop on the New York Times putting out an internal call regarding the first site redesign in 4yrs with special attention given RSS and G news:

"Next year, the site will embark on its first redesign in four years in an Internet environment that has changed dramatically. Back then there were no Google News or RSS feeds, or even much broadband outside the workplace. Also, video's time on the Web hadn't really arrived. The growth of new technologies like Google News and RSS represent major challenges and opportunities for our storytelling. How we respond will be critical for the long-term health of NYTimes.com."

btw, untill i get a page up for this, anonymous rumour can be sent to rumours@threadwatch.org

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Is Content and Usability Spamming?

This thread is in its early days still. Marcia at SEW,

made a quality decision at that time to ignore Google and whatever the latest thing was that they or any other search engine had up their sleeve, and instead dug into search engine research papers

which is an interesting approach in the context of spamming.

Useability, customer needs and content; spam?

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Adsense Bans Pharma Sites

Thats right pharma boys and girls, no more adsense on pill sites:

The changes to the policies today include:

• Incentives (monetary or point-based) to users to click on links or ads while visiting a site containing Ads
• Sales or promotion of certain weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles
• Sales or promotion of beer or hard alcohol
• Sales or promotion of tobacco or tobacco-related products
• Sales or promotion of prescription drugs

Jenstar has the details in the threadlink above...

added: goddamit - i cant speel, type, or paste urls correctly - soory!

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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A Keyword Stock Market

Jupiter analyst Gary Stein points to Media Mammon's new Keyword Stock Simulation - grab the details from Gary's post threadlinked above and get the XML here.

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Why does Canada Suck at Ecom?

A few interesting figures on Canada's seeming inability to pick the ecom ball up and run with it despite having one of the highest levels of broadband adoption worldwide and leading in online banking.

It's an eWeek article'ette - the full version gonna cost you $700

Do we have any Canadians in here that would venture an opinion on the problem of ecom in Canada?

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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The Blog Father - Jason Calacanis Expands Commercial Blog Empire

A short "interview" which I thought interesting nevertheless with recent Threadwatch member Jason Calacanis who has just launched Weblogs Inc's 62nd commercial blog: Luxist.com.

“Clearly there is a weakness, in that any one blog can’t grow into that big a business,” he says. “Our response to that weak point is to have 300-500 [blogs] in three years. We should hit 100 in our 4th or 5th quarter as a company, and that’s just fine by me.

“The only threat to us is that somebody comes in and puts all their energy into one blog and does it better. However, if we’re number 1, 2, or 3 in each market we’re in, we have a great business.”

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Most Hated Advertising Techniques

An interesting article by the usuability Guru Jakob Nielsen about the most hated advertising techniques.

Advertising is an integral part of the Web user experience: people repeatedly encounter ads as they surf the Web, whether they're visiting the biggest portals, established newspapers, or tiny personal sites. Most online advertising studies have focused on how successful ads are at driving traffic to the advertiser, using simple metrics such as clickthrough rates.

Unfortunately, most studies sorely neglect the user experience of online ads. As a result, sites that accept ads know little about how the ads affect their users and the degree to which problematic advertising tricks can undermine a site's credibility. Likewise, advertisers don't know if their reputations are degraded among the vast majority of users who don't click their ads, but might well be annoyed by them.

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Google as a Tool to Communicate with Alien Life?

Interesting article on Space.com that suggests uploading the Google datacenters to aid extraterrestrials in understanding our language and society - kind of funny, but waaay cool aswell :)

So here’s my take on message construction: Forget about sending mathematical relationships, the value of pi, or the Fibonacci series. Rid your brain of the thought (no doubt borrowed from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") that aliens are best addressed with musical arpeggios. No, if we want to broadcast a message from Earth, I propose that we just feed the Google servers into the transmitter. Send the aliens the World Wide Web. It would take half a year or less to transmit this in the microwave; using infrared lasers shortens the broadcast time to no more than two days.

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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City Search Launch Pay Per Call Ad Service

Siliconbeat in the threadlink above report on Citysearch's launch of their new Pay for Performance - Pay Per Call Ad service - Essentially, tracking calls aswell as clicks on the local search engine.

Less than a year old, pay-per-call is an alternative to the pay-per-click ad model popularized by Google and Overture. With pay-per-call, the merchant-advertiser only pays for its ad or listing after someone has picked up the phone and called them. Because phone calls are often considered better sales leads than someone clicking on your web site, advertisers will usually pay more for them, typically a few dollars per call. It's an ad model that's being marketed especially hard to local merchants.

Now if someone could just do that for affiliate merchants a lot of us would be very, very happy...

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Adwords to drop affiliates in Jan

Following on from Shaks comments about the demise of affiliates in adwords, my gossip tree tells me first week of Jan 2005.

DougS

Nick W

My Google ad rep told me... though he got spoken to about it... he had been told to let his big advertisers be aware it was coming... he did not realize they were supposed to be told to keep it under wraps....
I don't do any affiliate advertising but we do have a couple of products others affiliate market though luckily not as yet on Google.

So it is not a rumor it will be happening early in the new year. We even discussed that the reason it was not being done prior to the holidays was the bad taste over Florida last year - though that was pure speculation on both our parts.

Anonymous tip off i got last night, Barry also has a write up on this

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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Google vs. Yahoo Story on CNBC

Gary Price has details of Cory Johnson's story on CNBC about the rivalry between Google and Yahoo. Not surprisingly, no one from Google was quoted. They're probably still pissed at the series of negative stories CNBC did just before their IPO.
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High Rankings Forum Welcomes its 5000th Member

Congrats to Jill.
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Copernic Desktop Search is First to Fully Support Mozilla Firefox Browser

Copernic today launched version 1.2 of their desktop search tool, which brings a host of new improvements and capatibility with Mozilla's Firefox browser, the first desktop search to do so. "CDS continues to get rave reviews from press, analysts, consu
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Bill Clinton Helps Launch Accoona Search Engine

Bill Clinton helps launch the Chinese backed search engine and gives them words of encouragement that would make Google cringe... "I hope you all make lots of money," Clinton told executives at the launch of Accoona Corp On a funny side note, I joke
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Danny Sullivan Explains Google to Playboy

I tried to convince my wife that I needed to read the Playboy issue that featured Google co-founders Page and Brin. After she gave me the "talk to the hand" speach, I gave up. It looks like Danny Sullivan had better luck. Not only did he get to read it
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MSN Search Spell Checker

The MSN Search team lift the lid on the technology behind their spell checker.
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Crunch TIme for Agencies - Rumours of Agency Kick Backs being Pulled

Rumous are coming in anonymously via rumours@threadwatch.org that the "big two" PPC providers in UK (Google & Overture) may be pulling lucrative agency kick backs in 2005.

Agencies with large ad spends are currently enjoying up to 15% commissions on ad buys from the larger players and that may all be about to go POOF!

Currently, Google apparently say that Agencies must be a member of the IAB to get agency discount but according to Threadwatch sources this is known to be not the case. Overture and Google both discourage strongly any talk of agency discounts.

This could impact agencies in more than just the immediate and obvious financial sense as many agencies are reported to be sharing the kick backs with their clients in order to close the deal. One top industry exec was quoted:

"I am lead to believe that agency discounts are to be pulled in q1 05 by
the big 2, change of business model needed for many people."

Information is still coming in so if we get more, you'll see it here.

Threadwatch links: threadwatch home xml feed recent threads
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