Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas

Happy holidays and merry Christmas everybody. From me and my whole family we hope you have a great time and enjoy yourselves.

Thank You

Notice "Top Channels" Missing From Your Google Adense Report?

That's because the feature is currently malfunctioning. And yes being in the holidays it will be a while before it's fixed. A topic on Google groups is still asking for support but AdsensePro Ashley posted this a while ago:

Hi all, Thanks again for reporting this issue. Please be assured that it will be resolved in the coming weeks. We apologize for any inconvenience it causes you, and appreciate your patience in the meantime. Ashley

But there is some good news. If you go to the advanced reports tab and chose all tabs you can see how each of your channels performed. So even though it requires an extra step those out there with a lot of websites can still keep track of how each is doing.

As to the origins of this problem Jensense seems to think it may have something to do with the new Google Adsense feature of saving large reports. However there is no way to this at this time. Let's just hope they fix this soon I am already annoyed with taking those extra steps and my PDA doesn't even load the Java on the Advanced reports that well.

Thank You

New Beta Interactive Google Adsense Unit

Not even a day after a new ad format by Google Adsense is revealed yet another one is spotted. This ad format is dedicated to Google Checkout and features products with pictures and descriptions. It looks interesting at best here's a picture of it:

The Google Adsense folks are just bent on making up new formats these days. I guess being the holidays they want to maximize on the holiday shopping rush.

Thank You

Around The Search Engines

First of all I guess an explanation is in order. Well after careful consideration I decided to start a daily roundup of not just Google Adsense news around the Internet but of search engines everywhere. I figure since many of my readers are also webmasters they would appreciate getting all of their SE news in one spot. For the next few days or so I'll play around with the format to see what works best. So here goes nothing:

Google & Human Quality Reviews: Old News Returns - Search Engine Land

A quote from Google's director of research Peter Norvig in an article at Technology Review about how human reviewers assess Google's search quality is starting to pick up play on the web and will no doubt grow. Problem is, it's not news. Still, I suppose it's interesting to those who are new to the space or missed the attention it got back in 2005. Some history.

New privacy tips video series - Google Blog

In order to give you the best possible information about the privacy settings for our products, we asked the engineers and product managers who actually designed them to explain how they work in a series of new videos we released today on our YouTube Privacy Channel.

Viacom and Microsoft Announce Long-Term Digital Content and Advertising Partnership - Microsoft

Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA and VIA.B) and Microsoft Corp. today announced a broad-based, strategic alliance under which major divisions of both companies will collaborate on advertising, content distribution, event promotions and games over the next several years.

Taking feeds out of our web search results - Google Blog

We, at Google, prevent feeds from being returned in Google's search results, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures).

The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results - Google Blog

From a user perspective, this means that you'll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.

Google Android Developers Battle Bugs, Frustration - Smart Money

Google Inc. (GOOG) claims its Android mobile phone software will usher in a new era of wireless communications. But for developers such as Adam MacBeth, Android has so far brought nothing but headaches and frustration.

Live Search Is Returning Google AdWords Ads In Their Natural Search Results - Raven SEO

Live Search is offering a new way for AdWords customers to get click-throughs — their own natural SERPs. They appear to be indexing AdWords ads from Google's own SERPs.

Google Talk Live Translation - Google Talkabout

If you want to try it, just add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese.

Better flight stats results from Google - Google Blog

For the latest information on a flight's status, simply search for an airline and flight number, and the first result will tell you whether your flight is on time or delayed as well as the estimated departure and arrival times.

Live Search for Mobile Updated - Virtual Search

The browser-based local search and mapping site for mobile has been updated with a bunch of new features. point the browser on your mobile to http://m.live.com/ to try it out.

Google Cache Temporarily Goes Down - Search Engine Roundtable

Earlier, a bunch of folks looking at the Google Cache couldn't find what they were looking for.

Recently Posted Research Papers and Biblographic Info by Googlers - Resource Shelf

Might give some insight into how Google identifies material on YouTube. A very technical paper but the intro and conclusions can be of value to the non-geek. And a couple of other papers.

Yahoo Search Marketing Christmas Gift 2008 - Laptop Case - CPA Affiliates

This years Christmas gift from Yahoo Search Marketing which is a slick looking Laptop Case.

That's it so far for today. More at the end of each day.

Thank You

Google Adsense: The New Political Battle Field

For those of you who don't know the race for the next preside of the United States of America has already startled. Many candidates are already vying to win their party nominations. Among others Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is running for president. Now many people still have a problem with the Mormon belief and how it's going to affect his decisions if he is to become president.

He has sustained many attacks especially on the Mormon belief that before Jesus comes the Mormon religion will save the American Constitution from apparent disarray. This is what a new ad on Google Adsense is pointing a finger to. Not directly of course first it links to an anti-mormon website that points to a quote from a book they have that states that fact. Here's a picture of it:

Apparently the speech on his religion didn't matters none. Like he had hoped. But what is more troubling is how this is going to affect Google Adsense.

If this campaign against or for political candidates continues it may do more harm than good to many users who don't want anything to do with the political process. Especially sites based out of the US. Let's hope these new ads will use Google Adword's new feature to target ads geographically.Basically it's like being an advertising spot for someone or some rich candidate's fight with another one. Especially for political websites that tend to have their own views. Suddenly they have ads for democratic candidates while they are republicans.

We'll see where this goes if the campaigns keep moving online like they are this may present a problem. Especially compared to how online advertising is much cheaper than what political candidates usually advertise on.

Thank You

New Google Sitemap For Videos

Google just launched sitemaps for videos. The already have a nice FAQ setup for it too. This is going to help out a lot of webmasters who now can get their videos in the Google video search. Here's an example they provided for one:

http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html http://www.example.com/video123.flv http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123 My funny video http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg http://www.example.com/videos/some_other_video_landing_page.html http://www.example.com/videos/video1.mpg A really awesome video

I think this is going to create just about a whole new SEO stance. As users who are familiar with Youtube start searching other places for interesting videos, Google will be one of their favorite spots.

The are many video formats supported so far including: mpg,mpeg,mov,mp4,...So far though the information is minimal but I expect more updates soon. The process to submit one is also the same as a normal sitemap.

Thank You

New Google Adsense Format 2 x 2

The folks over at Google Adsense are testing yet another new format. This new 2 x 2 format looks pretty sweet not to mention very easy to blend in just about anywhere.

Here's a pic:

Thank You

Google Adsense's New Gift

As usual Google has sent out a unique gift to all high performing publishers. This year's gift apparently is a Card about the same size a credit card, but here's the catch it's a two gigabyte USB flash drive.

Chris Pirillo is apparently the first one to cop one.

Thank You

Maybe Google-DoubleClick Won't Happen

When Google announced that they had acquired Doubleclick many supporters of Microsoft quickly switched the now apparent winner of the search engine giants war. But maybe they were a bit too hasty. Across the world governments are changeling this merger in order to block what they think would be a catastrophe. It's a called a monopoly and in the end it's bad for any country's economy. The 3.1 billion dollar deal is perhaps the biggest deal Google has conducted ever since it started acquiring companies.

The EU decided today to continue it's review of the deal and not let it through just yet. While in the US the proceeding have been going on for some time now. But each of them are focusing on different aspects of the deal .The US is focusing on privacy as Doubleclick has uncountable data on users and not just what pages they visit but what ads they click on. With this information combined with Google's advertising methods the Internet marketing field would be cornered by Google. This is the aspect that the EU is focusing on. Realizing that such a monopoly on the online market might not be good in the long term.

The roll call is not finished yet. Now Microsoft has thrown itself in the midst realizing that this deal could completely throw it out of the war, it's leading the lobbying for more review of the case in the EU and the US. Microsoft itself wanted the deal with Doubleclick but I guess Google was more willing to pour the cash. Now it's trying to stop this deal in order to make for the mistake of not buying Doubleclick before Google.

No one knows how long this whole thin is going to last but one thing is sure and that is the fact that Google made a good decision by acquiring Doubleclick now we have to wait and see what happens.