Recently Shawn at Digital Point has seen some Google AdSense ads which have Google logos in the background. Generally many people associate Google with good (or being credible.) These images would probably increase click through rates on sites where the ads are not well blended into the content. On sites where the ads are well blended into the content then the clickthrough rate would probably decrease substantially.

He posted what some of the ads look like over at the SE roundtable weblog.

Part of the time consuming process of the link building process is that we can spend 10 minutes just looking for a site that links to our competitor that could link to us. There are techniques to speed up this link hunt. These link building tips can allow you to get the most powerful links with the least amount of effort.

• after you search Google place &num=100 at the end of the address bar. This will show 100 results per page. Since Google clusters search results by site this will make scanning the link list rather easy.

• Boolean search operators are link builders friends. Searching for links using link:blasite.com might work, but you also can find the links which have certain text in them. For example, a search for a common authority in your field of study AND "optimized link text." This will show you where most of the topical hubs for your field are. You can also search for different optimized phrases in the same field. This will show you where lots of the quick and easy links are.
• You can take link building one step further by also clasifying the TLD domain type or page title. For example the following search would give you educational institutions which link to Search Engine Watch with the phrase "search engine watch or searchenginewatch" in the text and resources links or partners or engines in the page title.

  inurl:+".edu" AND (intitle:links OR intitle:partners OR intitle: resources Or intitle:engines) AND ("searchenginewatch" OR "search engine watch")

• You can also search for links by keywords and specify differnt filepaths or page elements. For example, you can find out which .htm or .html filepath extension pages have the words "search engine marketing" in a the page copy which also have "link partners" in the page title by using the following search: "search engine marketing" intitle:"link partners" (*.htm OR *.html)
• A site keeps screwing up my link building. If there is a specific site which is still overcrowding the search results even after you do all the above you can filter is out. Place -site:www.your-link-blocker.com at the end of your search query.

Using the above ideas in a creative way can allow a person with no automated software, no money, and a good idea worth spreading to quickly dominate search results. You are now an advanced Google link building stud :)

Google is rather random with the update cycle for the Google Directory. Many people have speculated that they want to dump the mirror of the Open Directory Project in favor of some other type of directory - perhaps maybe an internally created directory.

The Google Directory is a clone of the Open Directory Project, which is the largest free directory on the web. Anyone is free to create their own local copy of the Open Directory Project by using a feed from the RDF dump which is usually updated multiple times a month.

Gooogle last Updated the Google Directory in early November of 2003, and we can probably assume it will be many more months before it updates again...

The new Google Directory data is showing in some of the search results, but is not in all of the searchable directories on all of the servers...

(Found on The Search Engine Journal)

Despite the ads which show on some of my pages, this Google AdWords entry should show that my site is not intentionally biased toward any particular engine.

Google AdWords Account Syndication

There are many unique controls and ideas within the Google AdWords system. One of the more interesting features is ad syndication.

Google will allow you to target your site to

• Google

• Google + other search sites
• Google + content sites
• Google + other search sites + content sites

Google AdWords Price Formula
Unlike many other pay per click search engine marketing systems, Google factors click through rate into the click price. [bid * click through rate = click price].

Google AdWords Click Through Rate Calculation
Content sites provide unpredicatable click through rates. Google does not use these sites to figure out the average click through rate. Google figures out the click through rate by looking at the average click through rate for the last 1,000 SEARCH ad impressions for that keyword. Until your ad gets to 1,000 impressions your click through rate is figured in at 1%. A well targeted ad will pull many times that 1% click through rate.

The whole point of this post is that it is may not worth paying for CONTENT syndication until your click through rates (and prices) have been established.

leviathan Swimming through the sea of the web, Google lists over 4,000,000,000 documents in their database.

Google also released a press release stating they have retooled their image search and now have over 6,000,000,000 total items in their database.