according to SERoundtable you can view the story here

Thanks Google

This is pretty unheard of.  My daily routine of firing up Firefox and checking email then Adwords was cut short this morning when I got the following error message that Adwords doesn’t support FireFox 3.5

What? Seriously? Hey Adwords, at least give me the link to switch to the old interface which would be much easier then me hunting down an older version of Firefox.

Sheesh..how lame!

Google is slowly rolling out the recently announced new UI for Google Adwords.

Get yours by signing up here

PS- I’m back from South America and will hopefully be posting a little bit more here.

If you log into your adwords account today you may receive a pop-up alerting you that a new ‘Beta Interface’ is available. If you don’t have the notification look to the upper right hand corner for a ‘Beta Interface’ link and it may be there for you..

You can see the interface in the screen shot which looks like a mutation of Google Adwords and Google Analytics. This is a much needed improvement in usability and efficiency. I love the ease in which you can navigate through the campaigns and ad groups, the graph and the expanded view.

I thought things would be different.  Our first black President is supposed to help us move past racial barriers not build up walls around our http-requests.  Apparently, the folks over at Black Bird Browser didn’t get the memo and have released a browser specifically for the African American community.  No, I’m not joking.

Blackbird is the web browser for the African American community.  Blackbird was developed by a team of African Americans to allow you to connect to what’s going on in the African American community.

As it appears to be a rebranded version of Firefox, the browser’s site states that it contains
“Black Search, Black News Ticker, Black Bookmarks, Blackbird TV..” as some of its African American focused features.

The racial browser wars don’t stop there as I have also stumbled upon White Bird Browser

White Bird is the web browser for the White American Community. White Bird was developed by a team of white people and is in no way related to the Blackbird project.

It’s obvious that the creator of Whitebird took quite offense to the Blackbird project and wanted to make a point. As I spent time investigating each site, i noticed something interesting. The Black bird browser was only available on Windows platforms, whereas, as if by design, the white bird browser was available on multiple, including windows and mac. Perhaps white people use both.

I will close with one final thought on this debacle, both are a proud people and seek to advance their own well being, at whatever the cost. Perhaps in this case, while the browsers are free, it is their dignity that was sold.

Ever since Google’s official acquisition of DoubleClick Perfomics, lots of people in the search community protested about conflicts of interest on Google’s part. They also are worried about their competition, DoubleClick Performics’ Search Marketing, not playing fair. It seems like Google decided to do the right thing. They’re keeping the affiliate marketing side of DoubleClick, and selling off the Search Marketing unit.

This move is definitely good for Google’s reputation. But if Google didn’t sell off Doubleclick’s search marketing department, personally, I think the only “unfair” thing about them would be the fact that DoubleClick’s sales people can persuade potential clients to pick them over another major agency because they are the only search marketing company owned by Google.

But as far as the effectiveness of SEO goes, I don’t think they have a major edge comparing to other agencies. As I’ve stated a year ago,

So…….if you have inside knowlege about Google’s algorithms, spend
a year disecting every little line, what conclusion would you get?
“We need more quality back links with keywords as anchor text!”.

All is fair; SEO isn’t a “secret”, there isn’t much “insider
knowledge”, I think we know what it takes to rank well for specific
keywords for specific sites.

On the subject of “playing fair”, I don’t think Google will give
Performatics special treatment. Google refused “manual manipulation”
when “Miserable Failure” hype came around, it certainly wouldn’t
manually put their clients first for specific keywords.

Google put into effect its new Adwords policy where your display URL has to match the destination URL today. Make sure yours match!

“Important Change to URL Policy Enforcement
Starting in April, display URLs for new ads will be required to match their destination / landing page URLs, without exception. Please adjust your URLs accordingly when creating new ads.”

here’s the WMW thread with more discussion

Barry at SERoundtable noticed video’s embedded in the SERPs in the ads section. This is something that is pretty important because a video is a great way to illicit a emotional response from a potential customer. The connection a user gets from the text ad alone pales in comparison to what a video can provide so I’m really excited to be able to try this with some of my accounts. Imagine opening up a newspaper and being able to see that ad for the golf sale in motion (Copyright!), it would be more likely to get you off your but and into the store. Read more on the story at SER

PS - if anyone can figure out that newspaper video technology, i’ll license my copyright

Just a quick heads up that there are a lot of phishing attempts going around lately in order for someone to gain control of your adwords account. It usually comes in the form of an email asking you to “Update Your Billing Information.” The link in the spoofed email usually redirects you to some fake Google page with the .CN domain extension.

Here is a WebMasterWorld thread on the topic, in which AdwordsAdvisor says to report any emails to this link http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py

This is very similar to the PayPal phishing scams but as Google always says, they will never send you an email link to your account asking you to change anything.

Last week I posted about Google embedding search boxes within search results pages and the issues it could cause by being poorly targeted ads not to mention the ability to bid on competitors SERPs.

Well the NYTimes story today quotes a good spokeswoman as saying that the company has removed the site search box from the SERPs from a couple of unnamed companies.

According to a Google spokeswoman, the company has honored such requests from “a couple” of unnamed businesses. These companies, however, may not be able to reverse their decisions.

While this is good from a site owners perspective, at least those who feel they are negatively impacted by the search box, it does nothing to help us advertisers from being able to prevent our ads from showing or from preventing our competition from showing their ads. We will keep a close eye on how this story continues to develop but for now you can read more on the story at SEJ and WebMasterWorld