Yahoo Search Marketing Exam suspended until further Notice

Yahoo Search Marketing was conducting exams to qualify Agencies, PPC management companies and individuals as Yahoo Search PPC ambassadors. It seems yahoo has suspended the program now.

I don’t see any official report from yahoo but when i go to sign up page i get the following messages “Yahoo will no longer be accepting new Ambassador applications until further notice.”

Yahoo will no longer be accepting new Ambassador applications until further notice. – So yahoo has stopped accepting Ambassador applications is this a temporary one from yahoo or they wont be accepting any more applications. Our company just tried to sign up but we are unable to. Anyone else having similar experience?
This is the URL for registering for Yahoo Search marketing Ambassador exam.

https://approval.myaffiliateprogram.com/ambassador_signup.asp
You can see following message
“
Yahoo will no longer be accepting new Ambassador applications until further notice.
Welcome. To register for the Yahoo!® Search Marketing Ambassador program including access to the online learning modules and the Ambassador test, there is a one-time, non-refundable fee of $50, which is only payable by credit card. Please note the Yahoo!® Search Marketing Ambassador program is only open to businesses operating in the United States or Canada at this time.”

Adwords campaign can show active and still cannot show ads

This is news for me. I haven’t seen this happening in campaigns i manage. When i was going through Adwords discussion group in Google groups i can see adwords pro reply for a users problem. he says

“Please know that when a campaign or ad group is marked as ‘active’ it means only that it is *not paused or deleted*. It is not meant as an indication that the campaign is currently delivering ads. In other words, a campaign or ad group can be ‘active’ (i.e. not paused or deleted) but still not actually running, for a variety of reasons. “\\

So an adgroup can be active but still cannot ads so if you face similar problem check for other issues other than the status of Ad group.

Landing page load time now part of Quality Score in Google Adwords

After a long wait Google has enhanced their quality scoring algorithm to take Landing page load time into consideration.

Landing page load time now plays an important role. Starting mid of June Load time of html of a page will be important for better Quality Score. Good quality score is important for any campaign. If you have a limited budget its important to take Quality score seriously since it reduces the cost of advertising significantly. Ads will show up higher if the Quality score is higher for a particular advertiser even if the bid for that keyword is less than that of his competitors.

“How is landing page load time evaluated?

Landing page load time is determined by:

I. The domain of your ad group’s landing pages

A keyword’s load time grade is based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, therefore, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades.

Two things to note:

When determining load time grade, the AdWords system follows destination URLs at both the ad and keyword level and evaluates the final landing page.
If your ad group contains landing pages with different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time. All the keywords in an ad group will always have the same load time grade.
Let’s look at an example:

Say your account has four ad groups, and each ad group uses a different landing page: example.com/apple, example.com/orange, example.com/pear, and your-company-site.com. The first three share the same domain: example.com. Keywords in the first three ad groups will all have the same landing page load time grade, which will be based on the average load time of example.com/apple, example.com/orange, and example.com/pear.

II. Your server’s geographic region

We evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United States.

III. Your page’s HTML

Currently, landing page load time measures the time it takes to download the HTML content of your landing page. However, in the future, the load time of images, flash, video, JavaScript, and other components will be considered as well. We therefore recommend that you optimize all components of your page for the quickest possible load time.

IV. Multiple readings

To ensure accuracy, we take several load time measurements, drop the worst, and average those remaining. If your landing page is down for one of these readings, therefore, it won’t affect your load time grade.

“

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93113

I recommend make sure the page is perfect HTML without much errors that way it gives an opportunity to get better Quality score

Blog hacking with Hidden links injection

Lately lot of vulnerable blogs are compromised and hidden links are added to the blog. Some of the hidden links are pointing to porn sites or some of them are so vulnerable that when the page loads those links will call some malicious scumware or malware.

Especially word press older versions had these problems . Latest word press versions are well patched and dont have these vulnerabilities. Google’s automated detection has a built in notification system where if a vulnerability for a site is detected the site owner is notified to the email listed on their site. Also in certain cases Google will remove the pages from search engine index for 30 days and the site owner needs to clean the website and submit for reinclusion.

So i recommend keep checking your blogs often and don’t leave it unattended it will look to your site being totally removed from search engine results.

keyword research without online tools an interesting discussion

Webmaster world has an interesting discussion on how to do a keyword research without Online tools. This is a very interesting topic today there are not many online keyword research tools available. Only tool is word tracker which is a paid keyword research tool. Some people don’t like using paid research tools we used to have overture keyword suggestion tool but after yahoo acquired Overture the keyword research tool slowly disappeared and now its not working at all.

So without the facility to do free online keyword research how can we come up with a targeted keyword list.

Here is an interesting thread http://www.webmasterworld.com/keyword/3643349.htm which discusses the same.

Chameleon makes an interesting post in this thread

“. If I might add a little flavor to the soup.. 😉
Word-stemming has become severely important to ranking well for selected keywords/phrases.
Some time back, Marcia (former moderator of Google search News) posted a few links to the Google patents.
They are well worth reading.
At first blush, one would think that a good start to discovering what Google might be looking for re: related words/phrases would be to examine No’s 1,2,3,4, & 5 in the desired SERP’s, click on “Similar Pages” below each, and see what’s there.
Alas – not very reliable. Why, I can’t say; But after months of trial & error… I made some pretty useful discoveries.
Re: A website that is 95% about “blue widgets”, and 5% about “purple thingys” – the purple thingy pages would often out-rank websites that were 100% about blue widgets, for the “purple thingy” term…
Why? Because the few pages in the 95%/5% website had good internal links to adjacent pages full of related words/phrases.
Wikipedia (if applicable) was a good place to discover related terms
Google seems to be extremely smart about related terms.
E.G. A website about “telephones” is well served to include words/phrases such as ‘DTMF’ / ‘dial tone’ / ‘handset’ / ‘cords’ and other such words/phases that aren’t in the typical layman’s “telephone vocabulary”.
Keyword-based File-naming gets tremendous mileage form Google for rankings. Again, it wasn’t unusual to see a website with a PR of 3, out-rank a website with a PR of 4 or 5, simply because the site with lesser PR, had file names like “blue-widgets-for-dohickeys.htm” and the higher PR sites did not. {** Google likes dashes between the keywords much better than underscores, as well}
A web page about “purple thingys” MUST have these words, and preferably (1) related term in both the <-title-> and <-description-> tags. Old school for sure, but careful research shows this is still worth its weight in platinum.
Again – seemingly old-school, but Gbot absolutely loved pages with keyword-rich menus.
Websites that had redundant key phrases, that appeared in the same place in multiple pages, that differentiated the redundant pharses with an individual font-color or font-family from the main copy, fared far better than those that did not.
To supplement this, may I also mention:
Enclosing the redundant phrases in <-h2-> and <-h1-> heading tags did nothing whatsoever.. in fact, often it seemed to have negative value.
Having the redundant text at the top of the page, and related words/phrases at the bottom, both carrying the same differentiation from the main copy, was also effective
A web page that couldn’t logically or aesthetically have good internal links to pages with related words/phrases could do almost as well with a clickable pop-up window included somewhere in the page containing word-stemming;
Moreover, Google would often list this pop-up page, (provided it was a full-flavored HTML page with good copy but with it’s size trimmed by the pop-up command’s dimensions) as the 2nd most important page in the site “about” the key phrase –
However, the pop-up page needed different <-title-> and <-description-> text; Again, using word-stemming.
A good question is: What’s all this worth?
After many months, and following the above somewhat didactical policies, I drove three different websites from <50 to Top 5 spots in the desired SERP's.. and some of these SERP's had dozens of relevant competitors, with better PR! "

Looking to promote your prom dresses website in PPC?

Are you looking to promote your prom dress selling website or are you already an advertiser. Yahoo Search Marketing Blog offers some valuable tips on areas you need to target and improve to get maximum exposure, sales and traffic through Yahoo Sponsored results.

Some valuable tips:

1. Separate Campaigns
Targeting different type of customers for different theme is very important. YSM blog suggests creating separating campaigns if you are running a gift card sale as well as a prom dress sale.
2. Promotional language
Ofcourse i agree with Yahoo on this one, Promotional language is very important people love to hear words like gifts, coupons, sale, discount, offers etc. So make sure you add proper promotional campaign in the ads.

3. Keyword/creative conflict
Make sure that your titles and descriptions don’t clash with their associated keywords. Even when the keyword appears in the creative, searchers may skip the ad if the main focus appears to be on something else.
4. Keyword insertion and Alt Text
Our Keyword Insertion tool helps make sure that the user’s search term always appears in your ads, and Alt Text helps the ad appear the way you want it.
5. Customization helps
Greeting card sites that offer customizable cards should be sure to mention that in their ads, as it likely will resonate with searchers.
6. Scope of offerings
Searches using general terms shouldn’t lead to an ad for a very specific item. For example, people searching with terms like “prom dress” usually want to be able to browse a variety of styles and colors, and may not click on an ad that promotes a “red floor-length strapless prom dress.”
You may not still remember everything about your prom night or graduation, but if you remember these few important tips, you can make your ads the “class” of ’08.

Read more detailed information here in Yahoo search engine marketing blog.

Anabolic steroids – nutritional supplement sites blocked in Google Adwords

Google AdWords has started blocking Ads related to Nutritional supplements and vitamin supplements from their AdWords sponsored results. Google’s new policy is very tough on sites promoting Nutritional supplements they say sites promoting Anabolic steroids , muscle enhances, muscle stacking products are banned from their AdWords advertising. Though this sounds like a good option for end users Google will be looking millions of dollars in revenue since these sites spend a lot of money for online advertising.

We run 2 or 3 campaigns in SEO for site promoting nutritional supplement products they are doing moderately well and gains good traffic and Business for those sites. There are people out there who want these products Google is just sacrificing their Business to maintain quality to their AdWords sponsored results it is a very good sign.

PPC management team,

Zombie websites – Expired domains replaced with old content

Hobbs of webmaster world complains here that Google is allowing Adsense ads to be published on Zombie sites. Zombie sites according to him are sites that are mostly expired domains which are replaced with its original content to make it look as if its the same site. Most of these sites completely loose their Google rankings since google has whois data which is updated internally and any major change to a whois of a particular site especially if the site changes hands google automatically imposes a penalty and makes sure all backlinks to that domain are banned and the site has to start gaining new backlinks.
So Google does its work but the sites that are expired still might get traffic from Backlinks they had previously the question of the main poster in this thread is why does Google allow sites that are like these to publish adsense ads. That is a Good question which only Google can respond.

My take on this Google don’t have time to check each and every site whether it violates copyright or its using previous owners contents. if some one complains they can definitely look into it and if the person who complains have valid reason then definitely Google will take action against the site.
I personally feel automated means to detect these stuff is just a waste of resources which can be spent in a much better way. Final take Google can keep providing adsense ads as long as the ads are relevant to the site if a valid complain comes they can block ads from being published on this site.

Which sites you filter in Adsense – Webmasterworld discussion

After Google released AdSense it is become one of the primary source of income for site owners who monetize their website through good content. Apart from the good results from AdSense there are a lot of spam related issues with AdSense. Lots of MFA ( Made For AdSense ) sites started coming up and this has polluted both search results and user experience. Most of the people behind MFA sites are big time spammers and they are ready to do anything to get traffic to the site.

Good traffic will result in more click through from AdSense and this will result in more revenue for the website publisher. AdSense itself is a very useful way of monetizing a site i always like to stay away since its too much abused by spammers. I feel today most of the people who see AdSense ads all over the page will feel that the site is related to spam. Its all because of the major abuse AdSense has gone through. AdSense itself offers the option to run ads for MLM schemes, ring tone affiliates, spam parked domains, get rich quick scheme, email harvesters, crap toolbars, crap software without a decent option to uninstall , scam sites asking funds for charity etc.

For publishers Google has an option to block certain type of sites from being shown up on their sites. Publishers have the option to filter out unwanted sites. This is great since some users don’t like sites showing certain type of Ads. For example a family friendly site don’t want to see ads related to drugs stuff we have an option to filter this. A cool discussion in webmaster world discusses on what type of sites are being filtered from their sites.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/3636512.htm

Most common filtered sites as per discussion are MLM, drug related sites, ring tone sites, sites offering free stuff, Parked domains, Work-At-Home, E-mail harvesters etc.

Google PPC TV Ads – Google offering TV Ads campaign Management

Recently Google Adwords Blog Announced the ability to manage TV ad campaigns through Google Adwords campaign. This is an exciting new feature from Google adwords team. To run TV ads through Google adwords you need to already have TV Ads ready. If you don’t have the Ads Google also gives an option to find cheap ways to create ads. find experts through their Ad creation Marketplace

This is great and as predicted Google has entered the TV Ad market place.

Read more about it here, http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/04/place-ads-on-television-with-google-tv.html