Google *Stuff*

From: Searchnewz.com

As a paying Google Apps customer, the lack of communication during recent outages left a bad taste in my mouth. Im pleased to report that I just received an email from Google with details of many improvements coming our way. These are much needed and welcomed.

Were committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didnt do this as well as we should have. We had three outages - on August 6, August 11, and August 15. The August 11 outage was experienced by nearly all Google Apps Premier users while the August 6 and 15 outages were minor and affected a very small number of Google Apps Premier users. As is typical of things associated with Google, these outages were the subject of much public commentary.

Through this note, we want to assure you that system reliability is a top priority at Google. When outages occur, Google engineers around the world are immediately mobilized to resolve the issue. We made mistakes in August, and were sorry. While were passionate about excellence, we cant promise you a future thats completely free of system interruptions. Instead, we promise you rapid resolution of any production problem; and more importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem.

Given the production incidents that occurred in August, well be extending the full SLA credit to all Google Apps Premier customers for the month of August, which represents a 15-day extension of your service. SLA credits will be applied to the new service term for accounts with a renewal order pending. This credit will be applied to your account automatically so theres no action needed on your part.

Weve also heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur. Here are three things that were doing to make things better:

1. Were building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:

a. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process thats iterative. Until the problem is solved, we dont have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that were working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.
b. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that its important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, well provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process.

2. In cases where your business requires more detailed information, well provide a formal incident report within 48 hours of problem resolution. This incident report will contain the following information:

a. business description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact;
b. technical description of the problem, with emphasis on root cause;
c. actions taken to solve the problem;
d. actions taken or to be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem; and
e. time line of the outage.

3. In cases where your business requires an in-depth dialogue about the outage, well support your internal communication process through participation in post-mortem calls with you and your management team.

Once again, thanks for you continued support and understanding.

Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

Read Original: http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20080828GoogleListenstoAppsCustomersImprovementsComing.html

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From: Searchnewz.com

Google search result advertisers who sell products through Googles Checkout program get the special benefit of having a visible icon next to their ad (Your AdWords ads will stand out, as Google says). This could be an incentive for sellers to use Checkout, as the Checkout program has been struggling in the past (judging from e.g. Googles extensions of free usage for sellers). Now, Google has been seen experimenting with an even more colorful version of the Checkout badge, which in this case is placed in a pet food ad and reads $5 off!. Its getting kinda cheap. The pet food, I mean.

Read Original: http://www.searchnewz.com/latestsearch/senews/sn-4-20080828GoogleExperimentsColorfulCheckoutBadges.html

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From: Searchengineland.com

SES San Jose 2008 is now in the books and another Google Dance—that annual bash that provides us all with so much safe, clean YouTube fodder—has come and gone. Among the various features and benefits—upscale backyard barbecue fare, free beer, modified karaoke, dancing, and light shows—is the most fascinating spectacle of all: Googlers meeting other Googlers. (Oftentimes, I ran across Googlers just sticking with their own little clique and talking among themselves, but what do you expect… it’s a “campus”.)

Google is such an enormous entity by now that it carries a real risk of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Overall, though, the company does a pretty good job of keeping its initiatives in sync.

But if Googlers are always needing to meet other Googlers for the first time, imagine the effort of digesting a large company in the digital ad space whose founding predated Google’s by two years, and which brings to the table a variety of legacy technologies and platforms along with its own corporate culture. Googlers, meet DoubleClickers!

In April 2008, Google announced that it would divest itself of a key conflict of interest that came with the deal as a DoubleClick division: Performics, the marketing agency that runs a lot of paid search campaigns. Your agency shouldn’t be Google if you’re buying Google ads, clearly. In August, Google wisely sold Performics to a large agency, Publicis, for an undisclosed sum. If my very rough estimate of $300 million is accurate, this move at least effectively reduced Google’s pricetag on the $3.1 billion DoubleClick acquisition, but only by a hair. While letting go of Performics and its headcount, Google presumably retained the mature cost-per-action exchange platform Performics built for affiliate marketing, using this to replace Google’s nascent but slow-to-emerge CPA program.

But is the streamlining effort complete? Widespread layoffs at DoubleClick (at least 500 people) have already streamlined the operation, but arguably there is still a fair bit of DoubleClick clutter that has no real role within Google’s strategy. Of particular note: DoubleClick not only owns, but is currently actively promoting, DART Search, a bid and campaign management platform for paid search. Like a few other current, aggressive players in the industry (such as Marin Software), DoubleClick sales reps are currently cold-calling agencies to ask them to consider adopting the DART Search solution.

This won’t be a product review of DART Search. Maybe another columnist would like to take a stab at it.

A few odd thoughts and questions emerge from the experience of being pitched by a Google-owned but still-distinctive third-but-now-first-party solution vendor:

* Google has never endorsed a single third-party bid management solution, and has never really recommended anyone use third-party bid management. What they have done, of course, is facilitate those vendors’ creation of sophisticated software through an AdWords API. Heavy usage of the system incurs charges to the software vendors, which are passed along to customers. Individual advertisers creating their own custom applications are more likely to receive discounts or to be able to take advantage of free API tokens. The upshot: Google has never endorsed a particular solution. Now they do, but it wasn’t developed by Google. That’s awkward. An awkward question, too: how much does DoubleClick pay for API access? The same as its competitors?

* Google already has its own rudimentary bid management automation, with advanced dayparting (Ad Scheduling) and a new Campaign Optimizer feature that tries to adjust bids to your target CPA range. This forces DART Search reps to dump on Google own current AdWords features to justify the price of the third-party solution. Given that Google engineers may be proud of their AdWords platform, that’s awkward, too.

* A good deal of the benefit of using a campaign management platform is purportedly to reduce the complexity of coordinating campaigns from Yahoo, Microsoft, and other players. But does DoubleClick’s sales pitch really make sense if a good chunk of the rationale for using the DART Search product rests on telling advertisers it’s helpful for advertising with Google competitors? The sales pitch I heard prefaced that benefit with a reminder that Google AdWords constitutes 90% of the paid search inventory sought by many advertisers. Is that really making the case that I should adopt an expensive solution so I can be sure not to get too confused by the goings-on in the accounts making up a 10% sliver of my budget? Awkward logic.

* DoubleClick sales reps intimate that their competitors won’t be apprised of changes to the Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing platforms in advance of rollout, whereas DoubleClick is given advance knowledge so its software can be fully updated for compatibility at all times. Anti-competitive? Not so much that as underscoring the fact that Google is the seller of this solution now, not some “third party.” But where does this leave third parties? An API environment should offer a level playing field. There should be no real or implied favoritism.

* Google seems committed to the product. Recently a Google job ad appeared for a DART Search evangelist, er, trainer. Excerpt: “The training focuses on delivering the the how-tos and best practices of the the DART Search technology’s three main value propositions: trafficking, reporting, and bid management. The Training Associate also incorporating [sic] client, sales, and services feedback into the constantly evolving training curriculum and materials.” The ad also notes that Paid Search experience is “highly desirable.” Other than the eye-opening revelation that Google is moving into the drug trade ("trafficking"?), the fact that Google’s new staffer will be teaching clients the benefits of bid management and reporting features on this platform seems a bit curious. Potential “students” at agencies and client-side operations would naturally wonder if the whole interface is likely to go away or change radically when it is rebuilt by Google (which seems likely). The thrust of my point here is: Google is a proud product company. If they inherit someone else’s mediocre or unintegrated stuff, they probably want to build something better on their own.

* The next and last point is perhaps the most significant. DART Search isn’t cheap. That’s normal for mission-critical bid management systems. Unfortunately, now that we live on Planet Google, solutions offered directly by Google tend to be sophisticated, powerful, and free. For example: yes, a few quirky folks actually pay for the premium Urchin product, but free Google Analytics goes a long way for the rest of us. Google is trying to hurt Microsoft with free office apps. Blogger is free. Gmail offers massive storage to consumers, with no premium version needed. Google can’t train the marketplace to wait for free, and then call up with an offer for expensive stuff that mainly helps you with your Google ad spend (remember, it’s 90% of the inventory you want?). It breaks the spell. It raises odd questions. Or perhaps not so odd questions, like: “Wouldn’t I feel stupid dropping $50,000 on this service over the next few months, only to find that they turn around and offer the bulk of it for free? Why wouldn’t I just wait for that day?”

Confusing, huh? So what’s the strategy? (please read more at the original source)

Read Original: http://searchengineland.com/080825-130400.php

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From: Searchnewz.com

Over at the Google Blogoscoped, a post has surfaced, along with a video that has covered the Google Dance Event 2008. This is an annual event that provides a platform for Google and non-Google employees to to meet up after the SES or Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Read Original: http://www.searchnewz.com/latestsearch/senews/sn-4-20080827GoogleDanceVideo.html

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From: Searchnewz.com

At the beginning of this month, we had reported about the Google SERP update for the month of August that had pretty much every Webmaster on the edge. Now according to Digital Forums, either the August Google SERP update is still underway, or Google might have introduced…

Tweaks the SERPS

...a new algorithm altogether, as the SERP rankings are going bonkers.

Here are a few excerpts from the thread at Digital Forums:

I have noticed (including myslef ), Websites are flying up and down the Serps.
For me it started about July 20th, two sites lost ranking for every keyword, then two weeks later came back with worse ranking.

These are not a penalty, when you have a penalty Goolge will inform you via webmaster tools. Matt Cutts has confirmed this. Also it’s nothing to do with the Google dance, the Google dance lasts no more than 10 days.

Google wouldn’t introduce it so quickly if they were to bring a new Algo in. Think about it.

Definitely some major changes are taking place especially in terms of PR.

I hope so, it’s very frustrating, one week i’m ranking 5th page 1, the next I’m page 15.

I have similar problem so do not know what is going on with G. Have to do a lot on content and link building then wait.

Google did about 450 algo changes in 2007. It means 1-2 changes per week. Do we have a reason to believe that there will be less changes this year? Google does not publish or promote all smaller adjustments.

A major algo change would cause big ranking changes for millions of sites. That hasn’t happened.

Yeah I was a PR2 site. I added a ton more backlinks from higher ranked sites PR 4+ and my page rank is now 0 and my SERPs are down a bit..

I have a number of high traffic keywords that are bobbing up and down on page 1 of google. It’s always been the case and always will be me thinks.. I really think Google has caught onto wordpress and directory links and the more traditional HTML site links are much more “weighty” these days.’

Well I know its getting frustrating as I had been stable at #29 for over a month then jumped to #4 for almost 2 days now I am #118 and I havent done any changes or added new links so I am confused as to what I am to do to counter this adverse affect in Google.

Read Original: http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20080819GoogleTweakstheSERPSAgain.html

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From: Searchnewz.com

Saying “I told you so” often smacks of smugness, but it appears we were right about Google’s decision to make the AdSense for Feeds migration a manual process.

Google will soon provide a self-service process to migrate from an account on the original FeedBurner website to a Google Account. We have temporarily paused processing of new manual migration requests; we are working doggedly through the initial queue of requests and will re-open account migration services as soon as the first batch is completed.

(If you have already submitted a migration request, please look for an email response from Google once your migration has completed).

Read Original: http://www.searchnewz.com/latestsearch/senews/sn-4-20080825GoogleCantKeepUpWithFeedburnerAdSense.html

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From: Searchnewz.com

Google just announced they will start to roll out Google Suggest as a default feature for the Google.com homepage over the next week. For instance, when you enter presid with Suggest, below the search box choices like presidential polls, presidential election and more will pop up, to be selected and then searched for using e.g. the arrow and return keys.

Already, besides the Google Labs experiment which started in 2004, auto-complete features are available on the homepage of Google China*. As Ive never been a regular user of Google Suggest Im curious if that feature will be useful or annoying in the long run during daily usage. Google is convinced that it 1) helps formulate queries, 2) reduces spelling errors, and 3) saves keystrokes.

Read Original: http://www.searchnewz.com/latestsearch/senews/sn-4-20080826GoogleSuggestToBecomeDefaultGoogleSays.html

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From: Searchnewz.com

Sometimes I wish I didnt have such a cynical eye. That way, when I saw news"such as Googles Quality Score improvements"I could simply enjoy the updates in my naivety. This is what Google announced: A more accurate Quality Score Most importantly…

...we are replacing our static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ads quality each time it matches a search query

Keywords no longer marked inactive for search

The new per-query evaluation of Quality Score affects you in that keywords will no longer appear as inactive for search in your account. Instead, all keywords will have the chance to show ads on Google web search and the search network (unless you’ve paused or deleted them)

First page bid will replace minimum bid

As a result of migrating to per-query Quality Score, we are no longer showing minimum bids in your account. Instead, were replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first page bids. First page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google web search

This is my translation:

“A more accurate Quality Score” - more revenue for Google.

“Keywords no longer marked inactive for search” - more revenue for Google.

First page bid will replace minimum bid - more revenue for Google.

I’ll admit, I use Google AdWords about as often as I wash my car “which is not often” so, if you’re a big time AdWords user, please tell me what you thought, when you saw the new Quality Score updates.

Read Original: http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20080822AdWordsQualityScoreImprovements.html

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