As you may or may not have experienced, performing a search on Google.com is a little different nowadays.  You can thank Google Suggest for this, a new feature announced this week.

Is Google Suggest something we, as search marketers, can use to the benefit of our clients?   Or is it a gimmick, purely for the lazy user searching the web? Read the rest of this entry »

Noticed today that the Gmail login screen has a new favicon:

I like it – use your ‘g’ that’s already in your name & logo, very recognizable.

Went to login to Google Reader and get that favicon for that login screen as well… yet both services (Gmail & Google Reader), when logged in, keep their original favicons (Gmail has the red letter looking dealio & Google Reader has a custom Google RSS symbol).

Interesting… nothing like a new favicon from Google to get you perked up for a Friday morning!

Back in April, Ben posted about the Google Rankings/Algorithm changes known as the “Dewey Update”. Those changes effected Amplify Interactive’s rankings for a while as well as some of our clients. Now that things have settled down with Google, it appears that Yahoo! will have its own rankings shuffle-up. Here is a message from their search blog:

We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

If you see any changes in your Yahoo! rankings “over the next few days”, make a comment and let us know. Feel free to speculate – what do you think has changed & why? We’ll definitely be observing these changes as we make reports for our clients next week.

The big question of course is whether these changes will be given a prominent name like Google’s “Dewey”, and whether you might need to know this name when studying for the Yahoo! Ambassador Test.

Let me tell you a tale about Yahoo! minimum bids, Quality Score, and the Yahoo! Ambassador test…

Being the new guy here at Amplify, I have been slowly but surely working my way through the PPC certification process. Luckily, I’ve been gaining practical experience along the way. I was certified as a Google Qualified Professional in March and plunked down the $50 to take the Yahoo test last week. All went fine and I passed my certification – but I was surprised to see that I possibly got a question wrong about minimum bids! Here’s why:

Kristin received an update from Yahoo last month stating that sponsored search minimum bids are no longer fixed at $0.10, although content match minimum bids will stay at $0.10. Also stated was that higher ad quality may help advertisers receive lower minimum bids. From Yahoo:

“The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as:
•The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market
•The quality of your keywords, or their relevance to advertisers, as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them”

It would appear that Yahoo! will start using a metric like “Quality Score” that Google uses. Possibly/Probably this has to do with the fact they announced they will be running some of Google’s Adwords ads in their search results. My pure speculation is that this is the case. They have no choice but to use this metric if they want to run these ads in their searches, otherwise Google would be charging based on this metric for search but not returning based on this metric in Yahoo!.

Either way, when I took the Yahoo! Ambassador test later that week (aced it!), the information about this had not been updated as you can see in this screenshot. Somebody might want to tell them. Also, please refer to me as “The Ambassador” or “Ambassador Jules” if you see me out.

I’ve emailed the test administers about this, and when/if I hear back, I will make a follow-up post. Perhaps, I will get some bonus points and be a Super-Ambassador.

Read a fairly interesting article over at ClickZ today – SERP Position: Myth vs. Reality. Aside from getting into some history about how search result pages looked back in the day &about how PPC bidding used to work (man, the glory days of going into Overture and having bidding wars… now we have quality score, CTR & maximum cost per click all factored into the equation!), Kevin’s last paragraph ties up the whole article quite nicely:

“More recently, we’ve seen evidence that Google has been implementing the ideas and concepts postulated in its patent application. That patent addresses “determining ad targeting information and/or ad creative information using past search queries.” Prior search behavior can often help tune the ads shown (and organic listings) more closely to user intent, particularly if the searcher has been using modifiers on a core concept. For search engine marketers, this really puts the nail in the coffin of predictable position. As personalization by geography spreads to the organic results and combines with prior search behavior, each SERP could end up being unique to the user: the Holy Grail of enhanced relevance.”

Right now, a search engine result page can look quite different for me typing in a query here in Portland, Oregon to someone typing in the same query in Loretto, Minnesota.  A geographical trigger in the query might have a map show up with vastly different results, some PPC advertisers could be using geo-targetting in their campaigns so different PPC results show… those are only a couple of specific differences that are quite noticable.  But as SERPS continue to be personalized, we’re not too far off on having wholly different result pages.