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

I wonder where they got this demographic info!?

Maybe its just me, but is anyone else getting an error with the Adwords Editor when trying to post to an account?

We’ve all seen the rumors that Google has been testing various new search engine results pages (SERPs) but here is one that I haven’t seen before, a search box embedded within the SERPs. My buddy, Scott, pointed out to me that pulling up the query “Nasa” resulted in an embed search box *see image*.

This actually strikes me as useful because far too many people don’t understand the usefulness of the ‘site:’ search command. But while useful to users, this change could have an adverse affect on Adwords performance from an advertiser standpoint. Call me a pessimist but we could potentially see inflated ad impressions (resulting in decreased CTR) from users who are not in the buy cycle. If someone is searching a site, they are probably looking for something specific and not an ad so I’d rather not have my ads shown. Hopefully, if this becomes more widespread, there will be an option to be excluded from showing ads during a users’ embedded search search, which is essentially the ‘site:’ command. But given Google’s track record, there won’t be an option for exclusion and we’ll all be defaulted to participate!

I have no idea what is going on lately, and I have confirmed that my friends are experiencing the same problems, but Gmail is letting through tons of spam. Its not like its sneaky spam, its the obvious stuff that any spam filter should catch (Viagra, Cialis, Penis Enlargment, discount software). Most of it is slipping through on my Google Apps accounts, but my @gmail.com address is receiving some spam as well. I’m getting between 5-20 spam messages that don’t get filtered out per day and its annoying.

Hopefully Google will check them selves before I have to switch to *gasp* Hotmail!

Anyone else noticing an increased amount of spam in their Gmail / Google Apps account?

I guess it was only a matter of time if you have a userbase of 49 million. You’re bound to be a target of some form in this cruel internet world. First it was terriorists using Facebook as a recruiting tool, now I’m being bombarded with Facebook spam! Its either spam or the sexiness that oozes out of my Facebook profile has finally been noticed.

Maybe its just my sexiness, after all I’ve had this same problem with my MySpace account being the subject of many scantily clad “friend requests” and pretty girls wanting me to look at their pictures. I guess this is a new 21st century courting ritual, females go after sexy men via their social media profiles. I can dig it.

I guess I’m the only one who has this problem, so I’ll have to tone down my social networking sex appeal.

Its no secret that I extremely dislike arbitrage sites and splogs, I’ve stated it hundreds of times here. Splogs and arbitrage sites are the bane to any search marketers existence and as purely a consumer, they crap up my internet, so when I see SEOBook reporting that Google and Yahoo are cracking down on arbitrage sites, its makes me happy.

The one thing I do not like about this story though, is the misuse of terminology.

Aaron Wall states

Google and Yahoo want a direct relationship with publishers and merchants. They hate virtually any type of affiliate that is not a highbrow relationship.

This statement is not entirely true. While Goog and Yahoo want to eliminate arbitrage “affiliate” sites, i do not believe they have anything against your typical affiliate relationship. If they did, they’d really lose a nice chunk of revenue because there are whole industries that only affiliates use PPC (ie “Web Hosting”).

Its a minor detail but I don’t like people making a blanket statement like that, especially with a high visibility blog like Aaron’s, which happens to be one of my favorite industry blogs.

This maybe hard to believe (and watch) but someone actually created a Paid Search 101 Rap

SFW but watch at your own risk.

Some of you maybe seeing higher MIn CPCs lately well an Adwords Rep has confirmed Google did a re-evaluation of Keyword Quality Scores across the board. Google is always re-evaluating quality scores on a keyword by keyword basis, but every once in a while they change the algo and re-evaluate all keywords. The ones that have low performance across the system, and also low performance across the respective account, are usually affected the most.

What to do:
Run a Google keyword report (for a few days time frame) and then sort by Min CPC. For any keywords that have $10 or $5 dollar min
CPC, you can try isolating them in there own ad group and writing ad copy (without Dynamic Keyword Insertion) that uses that keyword multiple times (once in the title and as many times in the ad copy as possible, and maybe at the end of the display URL as well). The Rep couldn’t guarantee that this would improve the Quality score (and in turn lower the Min CPC), but it’s your best shot.