Today is 7-11, which means that there's free slurpees for those of you who are in the US who actually have a 7-11 store nearby. I think I'll be getting my free slurpee in the late afternoon -- but don't forget that you can get it too! Oh right. It's also a big day for iPhone geeks, as Barry blogs his nerd mentality on this blog. Are you shocked?
Yahoo and Live Search Updates
This week, we acknowledged both updates within Yahoo Search and Live Search. In the former situation, anchor text seems to be weighted a little more than it had been previously. In the latter situation, for Live.com, people are seeing big shifts in the rankings -- some going from page 1 to page 4 and others going from page 6 to page 1.
How Many People Search for that Phrase?
If you used the Google AdWords External keyword tool this week, you may have noticed that it now reports search volume. That is, it will tell you how many people are searching (approximately) on Google for certain phrases. It's useful information to gauge the effectiveness of some keywords and perhaps for inspiration for others. It's definitely a nice addition.
Microsoft adCenter > Yahoo Search Marketing
Life for Yahoo doesn't seem to be doing so well lately. Forum members are acknowledging that Microsoft adCenter is performing better than Yahoo Search Marketing. One of the primary reasons for this is that people are seeing that Yahoo isn't doing so well for them in terms of conversions and the bid prices are incredibly low lately. adCenter is outperforming Yahoo in at least two separate instances.
Google AdWords News: Landing Pages, Background Colors, Download Glitches
This week has also seen a lot of news on the Google AdWords front. First, some Google AdWords subscribers are doing poorly on their AdWords score due to bad landing pages and are seeing much higher minimum bids. Google explains that when this typically happens, the landing page may have been crawled and didn't fare so well in the system. Therefore, make sure your landing pages are optimal!
What's the best AdWords background color? Google is trying to determine that this week -- with a mixture of blue and yellow backgrounds. It'll be interesting to find out what they settle on. Personally, the yellow background for the ads is less intrusive and may perform better, but that's just my guess.
Finally, Google AdWords 6.0 editor is having problems and people are not so enthusiastic about the time it's taking to download data. From what I'm reading, AdWords 5.0 editor seems to be a better choice.
Yahoo BOSS
Yahoo's "Build Your Own Search Service" has been announced earlier this week. It's an API with some cool functionality, but so far, its announcement has had some mixed reviews. People think that Yahoo should focus on its content rather than it search, but others think that Yahoo's search may have more potential. Either way, it's something you should watch closely.
Yahoo's Priyank Garg Interviewed
Eric Enge of foosball fame has interviewed Yahoo's Priyank Garg and posted some interesting information on his blog. Garg says that the footer information is not used for rankings but for crawling, for example. Yahoo detects spam with human editors -- and algorithms (of course!). Garg also says that spam might be in Yahoo's index, but it won't rank well, that Yahoo doesn't discount paid links automatically, and that quality still trumps quantity in terms of inbound links.
Google's Results This Week: Strange
The hottest trend in Google yesterday? A swastika, which is a Nazi symbol. Was it malicious? We don't know. We don't care that much either (but thanks, James), but when people point out these things, we report it for the search industry. As many people acknowledge, it's a shame that a religious symbol got so tainted in the past century, but moving along...
My friend Joe was doing a search yesterday for "special people" and Google asked him if he was searching for retards (since that seems to be a related search). I doubt that's intentional, but these things happen. And still, people talk about it because it shows that algorithms aren't perfect.
Sphinn is 1
Today's my little cousin's 1st birthday. It's also (well, tomorrow, really) Sphinn's first birthday, and Sphinn has had a great first year. Are you signed up? If not, you should be!
Enjoy your iPhone slurpee!
