Axandra news archive: 6 June 2006

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Test drive the new IBP and ARELIS version
• Recommended resources
• Previous articles

Google is using a new crawler software program for their AdWords advertising system that automatically spiders and analyzes the content of advertising landing pages. The name of the new crawler is AdsBot-Google. If you see such an entry in your web logs then your web site been visited by the new bot.

What does this mean to your AdWords ads?

Google tries to determine the quality of the ad landing pages with the new bot. The content of the landing page will be used for the Quality Score that Google assigns to your ads.

Google uses the Quality Score and the amount you are willing to pay to determine the position of your ads. Ads with a high quality score can rank higher even if you pay less than others for the ad.

If you don't allow Google's new spider to index your web pages, then your AdWords quality score will go down. Google has an official statement on its AdWords pages:

"While you can exclude your site from review, this will provide us with little information about your landing page's quality and relevance. Therefore, if you restrict AdWords from visiting your landing pages, you will experience a drop in Quality Scores for your related keywords.

(This will cause higher minimum bid requirements for any landing page for which you've restricted access.)"

What does this mean to your organic search engine rankings?

If you use cloaking on your web site and if you advertise your web site on Google AdWords then Google now has another way to find out that you're cloaking.

Serving different pages to different Google spiders can get your web site in trouble. We explained this in a previous issue of our newsletter.

Your landing pages should be relevant to the search term that you target in your AdWords ads. If you're not sure how you can optimize your Google AdWords ads, our AdWords eBook might help you.

Your landing pages should be related to your ads and they should convince your web site visitors to buy something on your web site. Good landing pages work with PPC ads as well as with organic search engine listings.

If you want to learn more about turning web site visitors into customers, take a look at the chapter "How to turn visitors into sales" in our free SEO ebook.

Google unveiling Excel competitor

"Google will introduce a spreadsheet program today [...] Although it's still considered a work in progress, Google's online spreadsheet will offer consumers and businesses a free alternative to Microsoft's Excel. [...] Google's spreadsheet initially will be distributed to a limited audience."

Editor's note: Take the Google Spreadsheets tour.

Google debuts video ads

"Google introduced click-to-play video ads in the United States, Canada and Japan. Click-to-play video ads are user-initiated, will run on the AdWords auction model and can be targeted to specific sites or contextually."

Google remains leading UK search engine

"[Google's] share of the online search market was 77 per cent in May, according to web monitoring firm Hitwise. MSN and Yahoo [...] currently power about 7 per cent of all UK internet searches."

Yahoo's search resources for webmasters

"Useful links on Yahoo! for site owners and webmasters looking for information on content guidelines, search community, webmaster support and feedback, site promotion, and search marketing."

Search engine newslets

• Ask.com launches blog & feed search engine.
• Froogle Merchant Center has been integrated into Google Base.
• Google can't sell all the ads that are fit to print.
• Google adds chat to Gmail.
• Microsoft awards search engine research grants.
• Microsoft is embedding advertising in its Windows Live Mail Desktop.
• Yahoo Video to compete with Google and YouTube.
• Yahoo updates its social bookmarking service MyWeb.
• Yahoo joins Google in tiny CEO pay.

Who's really running Google?

"Peek inside the Googleplex, and what you'll see looks more like swarm behavior than a military drill. In many families, everyone has to pitch in and do some grungy work to keep the household running. But at Google, every engineer acts like the favorite child."

Google competing with television on a global basis?

"Google's Video Ads could be what many consider a 'disruptive technology' that could further depress the declining television commercial industry."

Press releases more popular than reported news

"Internet searches fail 30% of the time, people are spending more time searching for information online, and press releases have surpassed trade journals as the leading source of information for knowledge workers. This according to a new report from research firm Outsell."

Be careful where you point and click

"The researchers analyzed results of searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask and found that 'all of the major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords' [...]"

We're currently developing the new generation of our web promotion tools ARELIS and IBP. You can be among the first to test the new generation.

The most complete search engine optimization tool

Both ARELIS and IBP have been integrated into one user interface. IBP and ARELIS are still two independent programs but it is now much easier to work with both programs on the same web site.

In addition, the new Top 10 Inbound Link Optimizer tool will help you to get better search engine rankings.

Thank you for your input!

Your input has helped us to add many improvements to the new version during the beta test. The new version is almost ready for the final release. The latest beta version is very stable but it still needs some testing.

This is probably one of the latest beta versions before the final release. Only if you're comfortable testing pre-release versions that are not intended for daily work, you should download the test version. We value your feedback on the preview version so that we can make the final release as powerful as possible.

"You've got the best program I've seen."

"As author of 'Hiring The Best People: How to Spot Motivation and Attitude' I want to thank you for your prompt and specific help...that is important to anyone buying software! You've got the best program I've seen and am showing it to others who are amazed!"
Steve Penny of HiringTheBestPeople.com

• What Google knows about your domain name
• Google official: PageRank is not a big deal
• The effect of co-citation on your search engine rankings
• PageRank, TrustRank and your web site
• Does Google think that your web site is spam?
• Googlebot and Mediabot - Can you get in trouble?
• Do hackers hijack your search engine listings?
• New Google acquisition: can we expect a shift in Google's algorithm?
• View all past issues...