Froogle Upgrades...

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 # :)

BellSouth to Sell Google AdWords

BellSouth to Sell Google AdWords:
This is the first time someone outside of Google has been able to directly sell AdWords (to plumbers).

GoogleGuy World Tour:
Actually not a world tour, but he showed up at SEW forums.

Google: Not for Me:
Russell Baettie explains why he does not want to work at Google.

& Not for Online Publishers:
Online publishers rail against Google - yawn
(thanks to Gary)

SEO Forum Madness

A bunch of random forum news...
Hired?
Lots of stuff going on in the SEO Forum scene. In the last week not one but two people have tried to hire me as moderators for new forums that are coming out. I said no, but talk about a saturated market... One of the forums is a big money pay site, the other will be at a link site (since they are not out yet neither of them are mentioned by name in this post).

Its kinda cool that people would be willing to pay me to do what I do for free anyway. I wonder if it would be worth it to try to make my own forum? I could have one of a million SEO forums :)

New Forums:
My friend Nandini is starting a new forum called SEO Zip. I am not supposed to mention it until tomorrow, but I felt like mentioning it with all the other forum stuff. I am trying to help her get it off the ground running, so I will try to post there a good bit. Please stop by and say hi.

Post Trades is a new forum dedicated to link trading. They got a cool tool for analyzing data about your site in the upper right corner too.

Derek Chew also has a new forum at SEO Place.

Forum Spammer:
(from an anonymous forum moderator at a forum which is new to me) I got accused of major forum spamming for the first time:

Your many posts in the seo forum smell like spam to me. I am sure of it. But, I am a fan of link spam so no problem... just try to put more thought into your posts. It is too obvious that your just trying to get a high post count and want to post the smallest amount necessary in order to give a half-assed answer.

I am not saying your answers are wrong - just shallow, and you know it. If you don't know it then you have no business running seobook.

I did not even put a sig link in my posts and all I could think was "what a jerk."

Retired:
Lots0 just retired from moderating at SearchGuild. If I had to list 2 or 3 people who taught me the most about the web and SEO stuff his name would be on the list. Thanks for teaching me so much Lots0 and hope to see you around.

Don't Forget...
ThreadWatch is a great place to get forum coverage if you don't have time to visit them all.

Moving Briskly Along...

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.

Various SEO Tools...

Free Reciprocal Link Checker / Manager Tool:
ClickSentry link tool I have not tried it, but it looks cool.
(thanks for the Scoop)

Free PageRank Tool:
yet another one. DaveN says you should run it through a proxy.

Article Submission Spreadsheet:
Recently a guy named Zoran read my ebook and is trying to rank well for stuff like Search
Engine Positioning Firm
. He submitted articles to a bunch of sites and created a free XLS articles checksheet which shows over 70 sites where you can submit articles. Thanks Zoran :)

A while back I made a much shorter article list.

Adobe Partners with Yahoo!
Yahoo! Search to power Adobe Acrobat

Food for Thought
another interesting DaveN post

Obligatory SEO Motivational Poster (Funny?): Many SEOs spend too much time at the computer (well at least I do). Thus I designed and framed a wonderful deluxe collectible limited edition motivational poster...which reminds me to do stuff like exercise and see the sun.

Feel free to use it if you need some motivation :-)

Motivational Poster.

there are lots of other good motivational posters on the market as well...

How to Promote a Golf Site:
Make a fun game...
(thanks to John)

New AdWords Classifications, MSN Desktop Search Coming Soon

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:
MSN Search image advertisement on AdSense.

Search Marketing UK Trade Organization...other stuff

SEMPO UK
no way Jose... Sick of the SEMPO antics, the brass of the UK SEO scene have made their own search marketing organization.
With the likes of Barry Lloyd, Ammon Johns, & Mike Grehan I am sure they will do well.

Spammer?
A White KnightTM is crowned

Yahoo!
buys Stata Labs who is the maker of Bloomba

GOOG
their stock is up a bit more on the day. Their market cap sits at 47.37B and Yahoo! is at 47.56B.

Google Reports Quarterly Results

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.

Free C Class IP Block Checker, Google to Grow

Free Bulk C Block IP Checker Tool
Check to see if links are on the same C block IP address, free... cool tool
Thanks to Nick

AOL Europe Extends Partnership with Google

Google, which already provides AOL Europe with targeted advertisements, said its expanded multi-year arrangement will let it target the U.K., France and Germany. Source: CBS MarketWatch

Google to Gain MANY Advertisers?
Google is to announce quarterly results tomorrow, and while they refuse to make forcasts, they believe they will add 372,000 advertiser accounts over the next 4 years.

Google predicted that the number of advertiser accounts will jump from 280,000 this year to 378,000 in 2005, according to the documents. From 2004 to 2008, the number of accounts is expected to more than double to 652,050.

France and Trademarks
The French Overture keyword suggestion tool offers tips on trademarks

Greed:
16 yr old says "let's sue Google"

Google Instant Messenger?
google_im:// protocol found in the Google desktop search.

Free Themed Link / Backlink Checker

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.

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