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.

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.

Algorithm Change
Around September 23^rd many webmasters stated they lost a bunch of their traffic from Google.

Google to Change Their Way of Rewarding Linkage Data?
DaveN is a fairly well respected SEO who recently made the following statements at the SEW Forums:

the whole PR / Linkage Game has changed. Just be careful how and where you buy PR these days. ... Last time I spoke to my friends from the plex, they where working on the ability to add - positive and negative weight to links depending on how they looked Via there GUI. ... I have never seen the GUI but from what I can gather it will highlight un natural areas on page, think about where most people put there sold links.

How is Google Fighting Artificial Link Manipulation?
A ton of ways...

• Make SEO itself sound a bit sketchy.

• Show bunk backlinks.
• Not update PageRank.
• Deweighting links from the same C block IP address range. (Google may also use WhoIs lookup data).
• Manually penalize some sites for buying or selling PageRank...or for being in circles that make it seem like you are doing that.
• Prevent certain sites from parsing outbound link popularity.
• Automatically penalize sites for using the same link text too frequently.
• Now they are potentially going to look for ways to not only devalue links, but also potentially make them have negative value based on abnormal linkage patterns.
  
• They are also probably doing a bunch of other things I do not know of or forgot to list.

Anyone who does not believe in the power of link building should ask themselves why Google is putting so much effort into making it harder to do.

This is kinda an experiment post for the phrase "GOOG," which is Google's new ticker symbol.

Google started accepting bids in their dutch auction IPO today. Some of the financial sites have added them and are awaiting the IPO. When searching Google for "GOOG" there is not much competition yet.

Incidentally somebody owns the www.goog.com website and there is nothing but a "welcome to GOOG" statement there.

I bet a top ranking for the term GOOG would bring in a ton of traffic in the next month. My absolutely random GOOG opening price guess: $94.37. ;)

[udpate: when I first checked this page it was #53 for GOOG, it was up to #8 for GOOG after the first day of promotion. :) I have not spent any money promoting this GOOG page, but have pointed a few forum sig file links at it. If you want to help please link to this page using GOOG in your link text.

I have a few more free promotional ideas in mind ;) ]

Several updates below...

Yahoo!'s Overture & Google Settle Patent Dispute

In the wake of a Google IPO this is a fairly quiet press release.

Under the terms of the settlement agreement, Google will take a license to U.S. Patent No. 6,269,361 and several related patents, held by Yahoo!'s wholly-owned subsidiary, Overture, and Yahoo! dismissed its patent lawsuit against Google. The two parties have also resolved a dispute regarding shares issuable to Yahoo! pursuant to a warrant to purchase Google shares in connection with a 2000 services agreement.

In connection with the settlement of the warrant dispute, the patent lawsuit, and in payment for the license, Google issued shares of its Class A common stock to Yahoo!. Press Release

More Info on GOOG IPO News...

The offering price is now expected to be between $85 and $95 per share. Google expects to sell 14,142,135 shares of Class A common stock in the offering as originally filed. The selling shareholders are reducing the shares they expect to sell to approximately 5.5 million shares in view of this new price range. This is a reduction of approximately 6.1 million shares. In addition, the selling shareholders have granted the underwriters the right to purchase approximately 2.9 million additional shares of Class A common stock at the initial public offering price to cover over-allotments.

Google and the underwriters requested that the Securities and Exchange
Commission declare the registration statement effective on Wednesday,
August 18, 2004 at 4:00 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time).

I am sticking with my absolutely random GOOG opening price guess: $94.37. ;)

Google IPO Share Price Set at $85

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Google (GOOG) on Wednesday set the price for its just-reduced 19.6 million share IPO at $85 a share, for proceeds of $1.66 billion in one of the Internet sector's biggest IPOs ever. The company had earlier cut its price range to $85 to $95 a share from $108 to $135 and the total offering from 25.7 million shares. source: CBS MarketWatch

GOOG Opening Price

100 via eTrade (for some reason Yahoo! was showing 140 though)

...check it out here (quotes have a 20 minute delay)