Happy Friday! Are you ready for the weekend? After this week's big news, I know I am!
Google Doesn't Want You to Rewrite Dynamic URLs What big news am I talking about? Earlier this week, we found that Google would prefer your domain to be http://domain.com/site.php?id=44&pid=42&gid=22&uid=29249 instead of using rewrites that are more human readable (!), like this: http://domain.com/site.php/tamars-profile-page. Apparently, the change is because Google wants to understand the parameters to understand site structure. But at the same time, I have a hard time liking this change especially since Google is supposed to take pride in user-friendliness. I understand Google needs to learn, and they can do so without targeting SEMs. There are plenty of unoptimized sites Google can look at. Don't you agree?
Google Messes Up Indian Exchange Rate, Owes Advertisers Money According to a screenshot provided by a Google India AdSense publisher, Google has screwed up the exchange rates. In India, $1 is 46.555 INR. However, Google has made it so that $1 is equivalent to 1 INR. Feeling slighted? You're not alone. My thought is that it'd be fixed soon, but in the meantime, if you're one of the affected individuals, just hold tight.
Google Integrates More Properties into Search Google Book Search has apparently been migrated over to the regular search results. It may be a test at this time -- it's hard to say. Will people click on these results? Well, will you?
Submit Your Reinclusion Requests as Many Times As You Want Okay, the title of this section is a tad misleading. If you have been penalized from the Google directory, you should submit a reinclusion request. If Google doesn't respond, keep working at it. Eventually someone should get to you. Speaking of which, we're running a poll to see how long it took for Google to acknowledge your reinclusion request and currently it seems that it takes more than 3 months. That's a bit frightening but is all the more reason why you should try to avoid being penalized in the first place.
Google AdWords Accounts Get Hacked Into More and more spammers are seeing the appeal and ease of getting huge clickthroughs and impressions when using Google AdWords. You don't have to wait for pages to be crawled. If you make a high enough bid, you're usually on the front page of Google on the sponsored side. This is probably why people are hacking into AdWords accounts where they can: it makes some people rich. Well, keep in mind that you can protect your Google AdWords accounts by following some basic security procedures (and then some).
Poor Quality Keywords Will Raise Your Minimum Bid You want to rack up some incredibly high charges on your Google AdWords accounts? Don't optimize your campaign. Advertisers have seen $100 minimum bids which often means that the quality of the campaign is low. Optimize, optimize, optimize!
Are You Making More Money in AdSense This Year? With a huge recession affecting a ton of people in the world, are you making more money this year in AdSense than in 2007? We're running a poll. Hint: it's close.
Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta has New Features There are a list of new features to be introduced into Microsoft adCenter Desktop Beta including the ability to spot and remove duplicate keywords and a variety of bug fixes.
Google Maps Street View in the Dark? I'm not sure if this was intentional, but Google Maps Street View comes in two flavors: nighttime and daytime vision. The former is hardly helpful if you actually want to see where you're going. In fact, the clarity of the map image I spotted really needs work. Feature request: Google, can you please actually review the quality of images?
Yahoo APT Launched The we-still-don't-know-what-the-acronym-means Yahoo APT advertising tool has been launched. It has some promising features, such as a larger ad inventory, a large audience, technological innovations, and more.
Lisa Barone is Going to NY YES! RustyBrick is happy to announce its newest hire, the very talented Lisa Barone, who is leaving California and is moving eastbound. Oh, wait. Yeah, Lisa is coming to the east coast, but we're not exactly sure where yet. (Thus, in case you didn't catch it, this is a joke.)
The New Year is Next Week In case you weren't paying attention (and most of you aren't, but that's just fine!), this is the last week of the Jewish lunar year. The year 5758 is drawing to a close and Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, will be celebrated next week. What does that mean for you, our valued Search Engine Roundtable readers? Well, that means that Barry and I will be out of touch on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, but that doesn't mean we're going far -- we have already prewritten several blog posts that will be scheduled for the days we're offline. They won't be breaking news, but they will be informative and should help you with your search engine marketing strategies. We hope to have our other authors blog the newsworthy stuff, so stay tuned.
Shana Tova!
