Las Vegas Tribune article...

From Froogle Newsletter Volume 4...

Ad Automator
Froogle merchants with over 1000 products who are also AdWords advertisers are invited to try out the beta release of our new ad-producing technology, the ad automator.

The ad automator uses sophisticated technology to automatically create and target AdWords ads based on structured data feeds, which are nearly identical to the data feeds you submit to Froogle. You’ll be able to create keyword-less data feed campaigns in your existing AdWords account while investing minimal time and effort. Simply send us your feeds, and the ad automator will automatically generate targeted AdWords ads that begin showing right away. You’ll be able to:

• Leverage the product copy you’ve already written for your site
• Generate specific, high-CTR ads with no additional work

• Increase the number of queries on which your ads appear

The ad automator provides added coverage by targeting queries that may have been overlooked in your keyword campaign. The ads produced are highly relevant and precisely targeted to the user’s search query.

If you’re a merchant and advertiser who’d like to take advantage of Google’s ad automator, please drop us a line at automator-signup@google.com. Please include your AdWords account number in your note.

Ad Automator if / when done correctly will be huge...

a couple other new features...
Merchant Ratings:
Google does not store its own rating system, but pulls together aggregate ratings score and snippets of customer reviews from third party sites.

Compare Prices
Allows you to compare the prices for a specific item in many stores. It is still under development, but already works well for ISBN's or UPC's.

You can see both features when searching for 0130957011... or other good books by # :)

Google Backlink Update:
There is one going on. Change shows at 216.239.57.105 and some others too... Not that it much matters, but in keeping with tradition...

MSN Search:
Gary Price finds personalized sliders.

Spamming RSS
Andy Ask's Jeeves for spam ;-)

Speaking of Ask:
They reported their quarterly results. I think the street must have been expecting a blowout, because they did about what was "expected" and are down over 20% in pre open.

Google Buys Image Mapping Company:
More about KeyHole...cool stuff worth a read.

Meeker on the Web
She thinks blogs and Yahoo! will be big winners.

New AdWords Tool:
A bit expensive for most, but AdGooroo could be interesting and useful to some.

SMA-UK (launched just a few days ago) found so much demand in Europe that SMA-EU was created.

One wonders if and when SMA-US will be created. Perhaps then SEMPO will have officially died.

New AdWords Classifications
"Google will use its predictive modelling to know what words are not going to do well and give them more time to run. Instead of the 1,000 impressions and you're out... this new system may allow terms as much as 10 times more access to eyeballs." ... coming in November

Google Toolbar is Evil?
DaveN and many other technically gifted aggressive SEOs do not like using the Google Toolbar.

Recent Google Lectures
Gary Price found a recent Google lecture and made a post linking to it and a few other recent lectures.

MSN Search / MSN Desktop Search
coming soon... Did anyone else notice MSN Search being advertised on AdSense? Here is a piece of one of the visuals I saw a few days back:

Holy GOOG Batman
Google reports quarterly results. Stock up a cool 15% on the day.

Funny
Chris Ridings is up to the clever stuff again. We the black hats...

More Pics...
Yahoo!...they are now indexing over a billion images.

Not sure how "new" this is, but it is a cool tool for free.

Text Link Brokers added a free themed backlink grabber tool to their site.

You input

• the keyword you are interested in

• the desired minimum PageRank
• Number of search result pages
  
• & your email address

The tool then cross references the backlinks pointing into competing websites and returns a list of websites which meet your minimum PageRank requirement and link to two or more sites that were ranked in the search results.

Pages that link to multiple competing sites are appealing link targets since they frequently are likely to link to your site too.

The tool takes a good deal of time to run because it has to do a ton of data processing.

Gmail clipped the email so I did not see the whole report, but what I saw looked rather useful. The email is available in both HTML and CSV formats.

One potential negative to using this tool is that you may be exposing your industry to the eyes of an influential link broker who may be working for a competitor, may soon help a competitor, or may become a competitor [added: Jarrod below commented that they do not use the data in any way other than to process the report].

Links (from people like me blogging about tools like this) have an intrinsic value which may make giving away some tools more rewarding than selling them.

Keyword Permutator:
Another one hits the market... The Permutator costs $50 and has a free 10 day trial. (link found on Peter D's blog)

Persistence Pays Off ;-)
Chris Lee of Keywords Analyzer has sent me a nubmer of emails asking me to post about his software in my blog (and since I was mentioning other keyword software I finally remembered to). Keywords Analyzer is similar to AdWord Analyzer but with a few extra tweaks. Keyword Analyzer comes with a 90 day money back guarantee.

PPC competitive analysis software as a whole is going to become a huge market in the next 6 months to a year.

Social Computing Research:
From MSN: Wallop... link from Beal

Industrial Strength Cloaking
Briefly explained from Fantomaster

Cool Idea:
from Chris Ridings...he allows smaller search engine and directory reps to receive notifications when their search engine or directory are mentioned at SearchGuild.

Roll Your Own:
Tara Calishain created a searchroller tool which allows you to create bookmarks to search Yahoo! from any collection of websites or folders.

Price Per Word?
John Battelle has a graph showing PPC revenue trends.

SEO Book Price
I am raising it to $79 in about 10 minutes. I still need to do a bit of grammatical editing, but hopefully I will be able to do that over the weekend or early next week.

Google Desktop Search
For Windows...does not yet integrate w Gmail. 400K download, no ads, only works on your primary hard drive, builds cached copies of pages and keeps a history.

• About Google Desktop

• Download Google Desktop
• Danny Sullivan Reviews Google Desktop
• Andy Beal Reviews Google Desktop
• John Battelle looks at the implications of Google Destop

Do You have Toolbar Overload?
Stop the insanity.

The ToolbarBrowser is a complete Toolbar Authoring and Management tool. You can use it to manage dozens of toolbars in a simple tabbed control to save valuable browser space. It also includes all the standard features for search, navigation, popup blocking, etc., so you will never need another toolbar.

Cool RSS Tool
Feed For All. More info at
ThreadWatch

Lighting the Way...
Northern Light Research costs $50 / month or $19,500 for the enterprise edition. press release

Google SMS
Google is everywhere...now there is one more reason to get in a wreck while driving with a cell phone. Google launches Google SMS

Google Word Clustering & More
Andy Beal with the scoop

Google AdWords Trademark / Bid Policy
Lots of fun with Google AdWords (or maybe not fun)...

I spent a large amount of yesterday going back and forth with a dozen or so people about whether or not it is ok to bid on other people's names as the trigger words for article and search ad display. Google does not allow you to opt out of Google search ads if you want to advertise on articles.

Some of the big studs in PPC often recommend aggressively bidding on competitor names, and other SEOs get mad when you do it.

The hypocritical thing is that some of the SEOs who called my bidding on their name stinky were also selling their products by bidding on trademark terms (edited out the not mentioned in their products part, but certainly many SEOs still do that...and I am not certain that it is in any way wrong). Some of the people in these threads even asked some of my friends to jump in threads against me (my friends, of course, told them to go to hell).

What is your opinion on bidding on trademark terms or other people's names as ad trigger words? Please leave lots of feedback on this.

Next Friday I am going to raise the price of the SEO Book to $79. Explanation / reasoning in extended post entry if you are interested in that sort of stuff. I will continue to give my ebook away to qualifying charities and also to one winner from each of my weeklyish newsletters.
I am usually all for selling stuff as cheap as possible, but I would like to continue to improve my ebook, and the time I spend reading and compiling data is a large portion of my life. There is a ton of value in that.

By leaving a low price on my ebook it makes some people assume it has a low value, which is absolutely not true. I work a ton to keep that ebook up to date and even go to many of the conferences that sometimes cost thousands of dollars to attend.

I still could improve the grammer in it some and I want to work to make it better and better. I want to keep learning and hopefully be able to pass on better and better knowledge. I could try to continue to sell it for $40 forever, but I do not think the sales will dip that much if I charge more, and if I charge more I will be able to invest more into it.

I also will still give away a free copy of my ebook to qualifying charities and am also giving away a free copy of my ebook in each of my free weeklyish newsletters from now on.

I am one of the many people who focus way too much on search engines and do not always give adequate coverage to directories. I was going to wait until Google updated PageRank before I mentioned a bunch of the newer directories, but here is my brief recap of recent directory news.

• A while ago John Scott sold BlueFind (one time $50 fee). He wants to create a search engine / portal and has another directory under development at SevenSeek.com (one time $40 fee).

• Topical Beach is another new directory. Rather empty still, but the submission cost is cheap (one time $13 fee). Topical Beach has a great name and may also have many sub portals using it software spring up. If it is done correctly it can work well. Even if it does not take off $13 is cheap.
• Ozami (one time $40 fee) is another new directory. Branded as a guys guide to the web. Not for everyone obviously, but if it is done correctly it could take off.
• Findhound is yet another directory from Clare at DiscountDomains. They have paid speedy reviews and slower free ones.
• DataSpear (one time $40 fee) is a now joint venture directory between the people at GoGuides and NAIS. I do believe DataSpear is currently on the same IP C block as GoGuides. Hopefully they will move it to a different one so it maximizes the value of being listed. [added: I am told that soon it will be on a unique C block IP address...good deal for all :) ]
  
• A couple of my buddies might be making directories and I shall post on them when they get them up.

AWIS
for the developer type...The Alexa Web Information Service (Beta). AWIS is currently free, though they eventually intend to charge for the services.
(thanks to Cre8asite)

Kanoodle Contextual Ad Program
Ads by topic instead of keyword, 50% payout, payment via Paypal, yada yada, learn more about Bright Ads

Next 1: Blogger Gone
Evan Williams leaves Blogger.
(thanks to Chris)

Next 2: Yahoo! Next
Yahoo! Next is a new Yahoo! prototype playground. My Yahoo! Search Beta offers many similar personalization services to what Ask Jeeves recently rolled out.

How to Build / Kill a Forum
my first ThreadWatch post. Sorry for announcing Threadwatch too early Nick. We can make up for it if a bunch of people go over and read it & post at ThreadWatch about cool threads.

Overture Console Update
They now allow a daily spend budget, but I am told your account needs to be on autoreplenish to turn the feature on.
The new console shows what the ads will look like in their short and full versions and also makes some of the bid management stuff a bit quicker. You can update the max bid by category instead of doing it word by word. Overture's console is becoming a bunch more like Google's to where you can intuitively make many changes extremely quick. The additional combination of broad and phrase match makes the system quicker to use.

Gmail Updates
Google added atom feeds and contact tab to Gmail.

SEMPO-Tahoe Press Release
Organizational leadership through press releases...oh how the web connects us.
Compare: SEMPO Press Release vs SEMPO-Tahoe Press Release

Similar, yet different. SEMPO-Tahoe is already up to #3 in Google when you search for SEMPO (only one more site to pass).

ThreadWatch
NickW recently created a new blog to track SEO forums. ThreadWatch posts about many of the often higher level & more interesting or elequent threads...including topics such as Guerilla Marketing, Kung Fu, and Vintage Mike Grehan Quotes^TM.

Interesting Looking Report...& Triangular Linking Info
although currently I am lacking in time to read it (105 pages). Take a peak at it if you are interested in
Surveying the Digital Future.

At Cre8aSite Black Knight talks about the future of linking and triangular linking schemes.
(both found on Search Engine Roundtable).

MSN Search Tech Preview
MSN Search Beta is back up now. ...more pages, clean interface, sometimes cluster two results / site together in results, still working on the technology...
(thanks to Gary)

Oooppps...
Andy Beal has more on the fake SEO forums (apparently he gets coppies of some of the messages the "moderators" are not posting)

Debatable
Presidential Bingo...fun way to watch the debates... but be aware the debates have problems. Also for as much money as the canidates are spending you would think they could market in AdWords? I know somebody who is marketing for one of them ;-)