Search Engine Tigers

With the need to transfer some campaigns from one account to another we hit upon the idea of using the nifty free downloadable tool direct from Google - Adwords Editor. This allows you to make bulk changes to your account while offline, get them just how you want them, then upload them back to Google. This worked fantastically for us, much easier than deleting and re-adding the campaigns by hand. Within an hour or so the campaigns were re-assigned and up and running in their new accounts.

Then we noticed the problem, our geo-targeted campaigns were now generating a lot of impressions and clicks. Going into the campaigns we noticed that the geo-targeting was now lost, and the campaigns all had a “All Countries and Territories” scope. This wasn’t a good thing, as these campaigns were for local companies, and we don’t want to be paying for people in Seattle, WA clicking to view a website for a landscaper in Fairfax, VA (let alone people in Bangalore). Contacting Google, they promised to investigate, and within 2 days of us contacting them they informed us that

Currently within AdWords Editor, campaigns using regional targeting may revert to targeting “All Countries and Territories” upon being transferred from one account to another… I understand you were unaware of this feature…

They then went on to give us a credit for that day on all clicks during the affected time (about $200). The wording in the email is interesting though, apparently a ‘feature’ is something that ‘may’ happen…

I (along with probably 2-3 other people besides her) know the ’secret identity’ of SEOFanGirl, the author of menofseo.blogspot.com. I’m not going to out her, as I believe she’s planning on doing that herself at SES Chicago 2006. What I will say though is that while she has a blog that has received a fair bit of attention in the SEM world, with mentions on SEOMoz, DailySearchCast, among others, I believe she made a mis-step by not revealing herself sooner.

Over the month of October, Andy Beal at MarktingPilgrim ran an SEO scholarship contest to identify the next up and coming SEM superstar. SEOFanGirl submitted an entry (I’m not going to say which week.). The first round of the contest was won by traffic volume, with whichever contest entry had the most unique views becoming the winner for that week. The four weekly winners were then voted on by a panel of 9 industry judges. SEOFanGirl’s entry did not win the traffic portion, and therefore didn’t make it to the judgement round. I believe that if she’d outed herself by doing a “Want to find out who SEOFanGirl is? Click on this link” push on not just her blog, but others, she’d have received a fair amount of traffic for that, and may have made it through to the next round.

Of course hindsight is 20/20, and she did at least submit an entry, whereas I just didn’t get around to it, so she is one up on me to start with. Maybe next year.

Does this image really fill you with confidence that when Bloglines comes up it’ll be better?

It has been announced that on December 11th (the Monday after SES-Chicago), that there will be a new site talking about search - SearchEngineLand.com. Now why is this special you may ask? Well, the main voice behind this new site is Danny Sullivan, the founder of what is currently the voice of search - SearchEngineWatch - and the other 2 named contributers are Chris Sherman, and Barry Schwartz (RustyBrick of SearchEngineRoundtable). With these 3 headlining this new site, you can pretty much guarantee that most people in search will be looking there for news as soon as it opens (heck, I already have it on my bloglines).

So what will happen with SearchEngineWatch? Well, it’ll probably continue along for a while, although if it starts to lose other contributing editors, losing relevance and authority, it’ll really fade away fast…

Update: Well, the news came out on Wednesday, most of those SEW contributing editors are following Danny to SearchEngineLand.com, things are going to be interesting at SEW… Next on the list will probably be SES. Danny has said that he’s going to be involved with it, cutting his role back over the next few conferences, to where he’s just going to be a speaker at SES Chicago 2007. My guess would be that the Monday following that conference (December 10th 2007) will see an announcement of a new SearchEngineLand series of conferences, which will mean that a lot of the authorities will go to / present at that, and not at the SES conferences, making them go the way that it looks like SES is going to go.

I do remember at SES Chicago 2005 that Danny said in one session that he wishes he’d really thought out the name SES, and come up with something a bit snazzier, but that it was too late to change it at that point. I guess now he gets a year to come up with that new name, and make it really snazzy…

Update2: Barry Schwartz has posted a little bit more about the move from the insider’s perspective

Update3: So I was about a year off… Danny Sullivan has already announced that his new series of conferences will start this June, with the first SMX (Search Marketing Expo) taking place in Seattle.

Jim Boykin’s We Build Pages has put out a new competitive analysis tool. Just type in your site, and the keywords that you want to check for and see what comes back. First it tells you how your site ranks, then it lists the top ten sites on Google for that keyword. It shows how they rank on Yahoo, and Windows.live (formerly MSN), the number of pages that each site has indexed, the number of links to that page, the number of links to the main domain, the number of .edu links, the Alexa rank, the age of the site, and the number of times that the keyword appears on the page.

Using this tool you can maybe see why you’re ranking in a particular way. For example, in the image above, should interstate batteries want to rank above Windstream Yellow Pages for this phrase, then this tool would indicate that putting the phrase “Batteries In Lexington” on the site a few times, may help them to move up.

The downside to this tool… it’s using the Google API key for We Build Pages, so it’s limited to 1,000 uses per day, if it doesn’t work for you, simply try again the next day, but next time try a bit earlier.

I heard about a new company called Powerset that claims to have search technology better than that of the industry leading Google. From looking at their website they claim to have a unique natural language solution to search, which returns much more relevant results to the end user. At the moment their engine isn’t available to try, they’re still in ’stealth’ mode. But the rumor is that they’re selling 1/3 of the company to VC’s for a $10 million investment. They’ve also apparently been hiring a lot of people from Yahoo, so they’re getting the experience in there…

Can they beat Google? Well, there’s always that possibility, Google has only been around for 8 years itself, and wasn’t always the market leader, although you do have to say that Alta Vista was not as deeply entrenched, or had access to the deep pockets that Google has now… Time will tell.

Google Maps is so nice that they allow for the use of their maps on any website, they nicely provide you with an API key, and lots of fun ways to do fun things with the maps. It wasn’t until one of my co-workers couldn’t find the geocode for an address that we realised that there is indeed a difference between the two. We went to Google maps and did a search for the address there, it was found. The mapping system that Google Maps uses has data from NAVTEQ, whereas the mapping system that they give everyone access to TeleAtlas. Both are copyrighted 2006, but it’s obvious that there are differences in the age of the data. Here’s what we saw…

Is this a terrible thing? No, they’re still giving the maps away for use for free on your own websites, which is very useful for a few projects that I’m working on right now, so I’m not going to complain that the version they keep for their own use is slightly better than the version they let me use.

So today I listened in on a conference call and webcast giving SEMPO members a first hand look at the new Yahoo Panama interface. This new interface is being rolled out to replace the 6 year old Overture / GoTo interface. Out of the 3 main systems, Google, Overture, and MSN, this interface was clearly the most clunky, hard to manage one. This update seeks to remove that label, and try to position Yahoo Search Marketing as the way forward.

One of the biggest changes is the move from the current auction style system to a more standard bid price + quality score approach. A great feature that they’ve added is that they no longer have the 1 keyword to 1 creative, with the new interface you can assign multiple creatives to a set of keywords, great news for anyone that’s added 200 keywords, and had it time out 1/2 way through while you try to copy the creative that you entered on page 1 to all. One of the more interesting features is the graphical slider to determing cost per click v # of clicks. You just simply slide the slider to see what they expect that you’ll get for that keyword in that market. It’ll take some testing to see how accurate that is…

The new Yahoo interface will also have Geotargeting, with several nifty new features. The first of these is when a state is selected, all available DMAs are shown with checkboxes. Clicking on these checkboxes highlights the actual market coverage on the map. This is very handy, especially when you’re working with specific locations, and you want to make sure that they fall within the specific boundaries of the geo-targeted location.

What is the interface missing from current offerings? Well, there’s no dayparting, nor is there any demographics targeting, although both of them are features that they are looking at implementing at some point. I’m looking forward to Panama rolling out, it’s going to make things a lot easier, and easier is good. Is it enough to differentiate them from the other 2? Probably not by much, but it does at least pull them up there.

Jim Boykin ran a poll on his site to see how many podcasts SEO’s listen to. His results? 32% of SEO’s never listen to a podcast, while 15% of SEO’s listen to podcasts daily. I would say that the main podcast that most people listen to is Danny Sullivan’s Daily SearchCast. Personally I listen to that on a daily basis. SEO Rockstars is an interesting podcast, one week it can be a diatribe about wireless phone service, the next an in depth discussion on how to use MySpace to generate links to your site. A new podcast that’s been running for a couple of weeks now is Search Pulse from Search Engine Rountable. I have yet to listen to this podcast, the reason being that I thought that Barry Schwartz tended to talk too fast, and over people when he’d guest host the Daily SearchCast, (I’m not saying that I could do any better), although with this being a different format, I’ll probably give it a try to see how it sounds.

One issue I’ve had is that when you run a geotargeted ad in another area, and you want to see how it looks in that area, you couldn’t. Well, now that’s changed. This week Google released a tool that allows you to do just that. It’s a simple url that you can change how you’d like to display Google ads in any location for any search.

So if you wanted to see what a person searching on Google for “Five Star Hotels” in Philadelphia would see, well here’s the command:-

http://www.google.com/search?adtest=on&hl=en&lr=&
q=five+star+hotels&gr=US-PA&gcs=Philadelphia

the piece after the q= is the keyword searched for (any whitespace replaced with a +). the gr= is the country and state, the gcs= is the city.

The page that displays has a watermark”Preview”, and clearly states that this is a testing site. None of the links work, and no impression data is collected from these pages, so there’s no chance of these testing SERP’s affecting your data. Nice one Google, a very useful tool.