Lee Odden

Google Advertising Professionals sent out an email today announcing several updates including a new blog called Inside AdWords:

Highlights:

• Updated Learning Center: Find printable text lessons, content updates, and new training material.
• Inside AdWords: Stay on top of new AdWords features, tools, and releases with the new AdWords blog.
• Promotional Credits: Bring in new clients with free AdWords advertising.
• Qualified Professionals Features: Get added exposure with company-level qualification and a Professional Status page.

Updates include enhancements for both qualified and unqualified program members.

Thank you to everyone who took a moment to vote for Online Marketing Blog in Marketing Sherpa’s Readers’ Choice Blog Awards.

Online Marketing Blog is listed on Question #6, “Blogs on Online Marketing“.

Voting ends tomorrow, so if you haven’t had a chance to vote, please cast your ballot for Online Marketing Blog today. I would really appreciate it. If you know of others that would benefit from this blog, please pass it on.

There are a lot of great blogs in each category and I hope this blog has been helpful enough to earn your “excellent” vote. Please vote today.

I’ve been playing with TagCloud and found it to be a pretty cool tool. A description from the web site:

“TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag’s link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.”

I’ve created a few “tag clouds” that have been very useful as news aggregators:
SEO – just a few of the SEO blogs I read each day.
Search Engines – Official blogs of the 4 major search engines.

What’s also great is that TagCloud includes Y! Q search so you can perform a related search within the TagCloud search results.

There’s an interesting thread on WebmasterWorld today with GoogleGuy and Henk van Ess trading fun-filled posts about the outing of Google Rater Hub.

“… The system that was up at eval.google.com was a console to evaluate quality passively, not to tweak our results actively. But when henk van Ess submitted his own blog to Slashdot, he asserted “Real people, from all over the world, are paid to finetune the index of Google,” and that made it sound like people were reaching in via this console to tweak results directly, which just isn’t true at all.

Small business marketing guru John Jantsch has created a new “Duct Tape Marketing Blog Channel”. This new blog channel features 9 bloggers, each with their own specific topic, writing about small business marketing.

Topics covered include: branding, public relations, advertising, innovation, business life, customer service, sales and Internet marketing. You can subscribe to indivudual feeds or to the entire channel.

This is a great resource for small business marketing worth checking out.

John is a fellow blogger at AllBusiness.com and is also up for another Marketing Sherpa Readers’ Choice Blogging Award – best small business marketing blog.

The Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research has been working on something interesting called Wallop for quite a while. Still in beta with a small number of testers, Wallop offers photo sharing, blog, and social networking. Very much like Yahoo! 360 but the interface is a whole lot different.

“Wallop is a research project of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research, exploring how people share media and build conversations in the context of social networks. We are currently conducting a small, real world trial of Wallop with small friendship groups. Therefore, membership in Wallop is limited to study participants until the trial is over.”

Wallop was introduced in 2003 at the Professional Developers Conference Wallop may have been ahead of it’s time. Here are articles from Microsoft Watch and Wired including screen shots and an interview with Microsoft social computing group researcher Lili Cheng.

MSN web blog mentioned today that version 3 of start.com was made live. Scoble mentioned something on Friday also. You’re supposed to take a quiz to see the actual interface, presumably using MSN search to find the answers. I think that’s an odd decision actually. Why create an obstacle (even though it’s minor) to viewing something you’re announcing?

This 3rd iteration is definitely an improvement. What’s kind of cool is that when you click on any link, a window hovers over the “dashboard” so you can still see what’s behind. I am guessing it’s Ajax that’s enabling that feature – cool. It’s still not Bloglines by any means, but it’s great to see MSN making progress.

Google recently engaged in a study with Millward Brown that polled 900 respondents to show how search advertising is more effective than ads in trade magazines and other traditional business-to-business media according to AdWeek’s IQ Interactive.

Findings of the poll:

• Search engines were used 30% more frequently than trade periodicals in the research phase of the buying cycle
  
• Search engines were used 21% more frequently than the b-to-b press in the consideration phase
• Search engines were used 62% more in the final purchase phase

Google now shows AdWords ads on business publications including VNU, Reed Business, Hanley Wood and Ziff Davis Media.

Have lots of time on your hands and want to learn more about how Google works? Read these Publications related to Google technology

As alluded to in the recent Webmaster World “Questions for GoogleGuy” thread, Google has updated its webmaster guidelines via SEW Blog

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Looks like relevant links are pretty important. Always a good reference, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Maybe it’s not a guaranteed inclusion program, but Google has launched a new experimental service that will work with the regular crawl to add web pages to it’s index.

Details available on:

• Google Blog post called “Webmaster Friendly“
• Excellent interview with Google Sitemaps Engineer at Search Engine Watch Blog
• Google Sitemaps page
• Support site for Google Sitemaps on Google Groups.

Details from Google:

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.

With Google Sitemaps you get:

Brett Tabke of Webmaster World has set up a “Questions for GoogleGuy” thread for webmasters to ask questions concerning the current Google “Bourbon” update.

GoogleGuy responds to many questions in the thread, too many to list here. I highly suggest you take a look.

However, I can’t resist a few interesting comments:

“I’ve been aching for a long time to mention somewhere official that sites shouldn’t use “&id=” as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage”

“we only export new visible PageRanks every 3-4 months or so”

“I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there’s less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused.”

“My opinion is that spam is getting hit faster, and that for the rest of this year, it will continue to get harder to spam.”

Steve Rubel notes that Google now offers a atom format feed of its press releases. His comment says it all: “It’s more efficient for journalists when PR professionals post press releases themselves in a timely matter and simultaneously generate opt-in RSS alerts.”

Danny Sullivan lists additional notes along with the feeds offered by Yahoo and MSN.

This is one of the most efficient applications of RSS and I think we’ll see a lot more on this topic over the rest of the year. In fact, I just posted about using press release RSS feeds last week with a list of applications outside the distribution of the feed itself.

As a distribution format, RSS feeds are perfect for press releases, newsletters and article marketing. Benefits range from unfiltered and near real time updates to subscribers as well as a method of improving link popularity and search engine rankings.