New Google Ad Format on YouTube

It’s been awhile since my last post. Been super busy with Emarketed! I’m going to try and start posting regularly again.. we shall see if I’m able to keep it up. It’s tough to blog regularly. Our company blog is handled by one of our talented in-house copywriters who writes on a regular basis for us and other clients we market.

OK, back to the reason for this post. I’ve read about widget ads from Google on Search Engine Land but haven’t see one that I can remember. See the example to the left for the ad from Rail Europe that showed up on a YouTube channel I was watching. So I was able to click through to Rail Europe but when I tried to fill out the form on the ad with London to Paris to find a fare the form went black. The spooky thing about this ad is that I’ve actually been considering a trip to Europe to attend the Future of Web Design Conference.  And I’ve been to Rail Europe in the last 30 days to check how much it would be to take the tube over to Paris. Hmmm.. I wonder if my search behavior pulled this ad specifically for me???

Yahoo playing catch up with local results

So I just read a blog post by Matt McGee over at Search Engine Land about local results in Yahoo. So I was inspired to write my own quick blog post. See the screen shot below of what a local search looks like for when I searched for: dentist. Matt points out that Yahoo was late to the game in this space but have made some improvements. Bing and Google both check your IP address when performing a local search while Yahoo actually checks your zip code that is listed in your Yahoo account if you have one.

So I know what you’re thinking. What if I don’t have a Yahoo account. Well I just did another search which is also below after I signed out of my Yahoo account and sure enough they’re also tracking the IP since they new the search was happening in Los Angeles. The IP however is not as accurate as my zip code since the first search result pulled up dentists that were closer. I’m sure Google and Bing will follow suit now!

Make sure and check out the original blog post by Matt McGee that talks about the Yahoo local results.

yahoo local results with no yahoo account

yahoo local results when signed into yahoo account

2nd Google home page advertisment in less than a week

For the 2nd time in less than a week Google has added a small text link under the search box. The last advertisement was for the new droid phone. Today Google is promoting free WiFi over the holidays at 47 airports and on Virgin America flights.  Now I just booked a flight yesterday to Chicago for SES (Search Engine Strategies Conference) in December and if I would of known about on flight WiFi I would of paid extra to go with Virgin! Hopefully all airlines will adapt to the new technology being used called Gogo Inflight. I wonder if Gogo is related to Google. I think it is safe to assume that Google owns this company or will acquire it soon. Oh but there’s a catch on Virgin. For a limited time it’s free! From today until January 15, 2010. Just like the drug dealer giving you a little taste to get you hooked. Google and Virgin want to give you a little taste of surfing the net at 35,000 feet.  I’d definately pay an extra $20 or so to surf the net on longer flights. I don’t think I’d pay much more than this though. We shall see!

So I assume some others will post on this subject matter later today. I’ll post some recaps later. I don’t personally mind the short little text ads that Google’s placing on the home page. It is a form of advertising and I wonder what type of deal Virgin and Google worked out to get this in place. I didn’t see any direct links to Virgin from the pages explaining the deal so they might of done this intentionally since there was some uproar in the community about the link over to Verizon on the droid announcement. My only concern about this is that Google would start opening this up to others and start cluttering up the home page. People have come to appreciate the clutter free search page! Lets keep it this way Google!!

$100 iphone app????

You must be kidding!! Just read a blog post that mentioned TomTom, one of the largest providers of GPS devices, has a $99 iphone app that gives you turn by turn driving directions in the US and Canada. I wonder how many people will be rushing off to itunes to get this GPS app. My Palm Pre has this built in and I’ve used this twice in the last 4 months. TomTom also has different countries available. So I went back to itunes and found that MotionX also provides a similar GPS but it’s only $2.99! And lastly the blog post that mentioned this said that Google is now offering this service FREE on all new android phones! Here we go again, Google giving it away free! News of this has brought the stocks of TomTom and Garmin down steeply. Check out more about this here with a very thorough blog post covering how Google has gotten into the map building business and the businesses of giving it away free.. or less than free. 🙂

Bing Video Results

Wow! Another cool feature for Bing! So I did a search for our company this morning, emarketed, and then clicked the video button up at the top. It then displayed all the videos on our YouTube.com channel. When I hovered over the videos I discovered that most of the videos will play directly on Bing within the thumbnail.  See below for an example. The left navigation also lets you narrow down the search by length, screen type, resolution, and source. I still haven’t made the switch but this is a cool feature. I imagine Google will follow. I also noticed this morning that Bing had my search history for the day and this was actually from searches I made this morning on Google.. hmm..

Site hacked and pulled down by Google

It’s been far too long form my last post. Will start trying to make a better effort to blog more! Lets get right to it.

I had a site this week that was hacked! The site was compramised over the weekend and I found out Monday morning. Got the below error when visiting the site in Firefox. Had to submit a request through Google Webmaster Tools for Google to review once we removed the line of code that caused Google to pull the site down. Basically the site was still in tact but the hacker embeded the site in an iframe. The URL that was in question was showing up in the background.  I found this blog that covers the story with more details. The error stated that the site you were visiting is a “reported attack site!”

reported attack site

So once we removed the code and asked Google to review we had to wait a few days. There was no way to expedite this! I tried calling some of my contacts at Google to expedite this but they said there was nothing they could do…

Anyhow the site is back up and our client is happy.

Twoogle anyone or Tw{msn}ter

Well there are more talks coming up in the search industry about Google and Miscrosoft bidding for Twitter, the micro blogging champ. Hmm? I wonder what this would look like. Both plan on using the site to push adverisements and are also bidding on becoming the advertisment provider with sponsored ads. Google of couse has a much larger network and a proven sponsored ad program while Microsoft has been playing catch up for the last few years. I think if I had to choose between Google and Microsoft, I’d choose Google. I just feel they’d do a better job with Twitter and let Twitter keep to it’s own plan and just try and monetinize the ad placement. Twitter is making out either way of course and that’s where I’d like to be in 5 to 6 years. If Google or Microsoft is reading this blog, make a note of emarketed and come looking in about 4 years. Hopefully sooner but a lot of things need to happen first!

Cool Google Tool helped me find book on Web Analytics

I’m in a blogging mood tonight. Just did a search for “web + marketing” to see if we come up in the first few pages of Google. Not yet! But at the bottom of the first page I found a link to this book on Web analytics that’s scanned in it’s entirety in Google Books. Wow!

Oh bummer.. just scrolled through the book and some pages are left out but there are over 300 pages scanned so this could be a good resource. The quality is pretty poor though so it would be tough to read this but you can do a search for what you’re looking for within the book and find whatever you need about Web analytics.

Web analytics book found on Google Books

Google results for website video marketing

I thought I’d post a blog about some results I viewed on Google today for the keyword website video marketing. emarketed had the first and second results earlier today in the organic or natural postion out of 35 million results. Four hours later I did the same search and found emarketed dropped from #1 to #2 and the page that had previsously been the 2nd position was now on page three. What happened? Some refer to this as the Google dance. I don’t think there was a major update during the four hours when the results changed. What might have happened was that the 2nd listing which I had not seen in this postion before might have recently gotten indexed which caused an initial jump in the Google results.