Cool tip on how to bid-jam your competition in Yahoo! / Overture a-la DaveN:

Bid Jamming : Ok, you pick the keyword you want to bid on and find that :

#1 is 25 ( what they pay is 5.01 ) < - silly boy !
#2 is 5 ( what they pay is 4.51 )
#3 is 4.50 (these guys pay .10 )

but you want to play in this keyword. So if you bid 24.99

#1 is 25 ( what they pay is 25.00 )
#2 you 24.99 (but you pay 5.01) <- Bid Jamming
#3 is 5 ( what they pay is 4.51 )
#4 is 4.50 (these guys pay .10p )

Nice tip, now you do need to be careful from being jammed yourself by the #3 or even #1 himself.

A new web-based mail service has been introduced by Yahoo! yesterday. The interface is a product of Yahoo’s acquisition of Oddpost last July and seems to go long beyond anything we’ve experienced so far with similar services.

The main idea is make the experience as client-like as possible while reducing the refresh time and apparently they are doing a great job at it.

Charlene Li, has a detailed review of the new service (which is currently on an invite only basis).

Overall, I think the Yahoo! Mail experience is excellent and will prove to be popular for people who already use Outlook. But Yahoo!’s strategy isn’t necessarily focused on stealing share from Google or its more formidable email competitor, Hotmail. Rather, I believe it’s to strengthen the loyalty of its existing users, and to encourage them to use Yahoo! Mail on a more regular, consistent basis.

Yahoo! mail has over 62 million users, and this sounds like it may earn them a few more over time. We’ll see now, how long before it goes out of beta and into the public.

The long awaited Google blog search is has gone live earlier today making it the first major search engine to offer a dedicated blog search platform. This service is set to be a major player among the blog search industry which currently includes Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket and several more.

According to the FAQ’s:

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

With all the hype around this service I must say that I am a bit disappointed with the current service. Since the service relies solely on information provided through RSS feeds (rather than reading entire posts), it is very limited because:

1. Since the amount of content included in feeds is relatively small the search index will only include that content.
2. Since most feeds include only 10-15 back posts, posts made before June 2005 are not likely to be indexed.
3. It will not be able to provide linking information between posts and blogs.

All in all I would expect Google to cross reference indexes and use information already stored in it’s search index (such as entire page content) to better it’s blog search. The product is currently very basic, and if I was one of the rivals I would not be too worried. On the other hand it is still a ‘Beta’ products and may improve with time.

The biggest problem with having unhappy customers is that you never know who you mess with. It can be some Joe that would not do a thing or some big mough webmaster that knows how to start a buzz. A great example for that is shown in this Threadwatch post named Godaddy Holding Customer Sites to Ransom?.

The poster writes:

So we sent a request for a link trade to the wrong guy and he reported it as spam. Now Godaddy suspended 24 domains and is asking $199 each to get them back, a total of $4776 USD.

and the post takes off with many people being concerned by this issue.

I heard these GoDaddy horror stories around a year ago, and immediately moved all my domains.

I personally moved them to NameCheap and have been happy to date. I’ve also heard very good things about Moniker and how they fight for domain holders rights, but their prices have put me off to date.

Most people seem to agree on Moniker as being a solid trustworthy registrar. While I’ve never tried them before and their prices are about triple those of Godaddy I have a feeling that I will give them a show.

In an effort to build an ‘Search Engine Friendly’ sites, some people believe that you’ll need to build it W3C complient. This way se’s can interpert the HTML code easily and give your site a higher priority over non complient sites.
This issue is brought up in this High Rankings post where reddevil asks for suggestions on how to use image bullets, but yet keep the site complient, and on the other hand not spam the engines.

The answer he got was relatively simple:

It won’t affect your SERPs, but you could just put alt=”" in there if they’re just bullets. In fact, you could set that image to be used in your <li>s, and then you’ll have even less code, because you won’t have to call the image, and even the W3C won’t expect an alt attribute on it.

As mentioned this coule be achieved through CSS in the following manner:
li {
list-style-image: url('/images/bullet.gif');
}

And then just indert bulleted content into a list:

<li>some text</li>


The post then goes into the importance of validating your code as a whole and supplies some really good insights.

It very much looks like it… Scoble reports that when searching in Google for Microsoft’s researcher Susan Dumais you’ll get a specific Google Jobs ad on top of the page.

Search for other Microsoft employees does not seem to trigger any similar ads…

The above issue is addressed in a post named Warning: mass local language inbound links can damage your health. The idea is that since Google places a lot of weight on anchor text in determining relevance, having disproportionate amount of backlinks in different languages, may cause your site to disappear from the index…

Google chooses the language of the site through 4 main factors. The physical location of the webserver (IP number), the TLD, The meta languages tag(s), where the incoming links come from and also the actual language of text.

Normally you’d think one of these factors could not override the rest. However, inbound links can override all other factors into duping Google that the page is of a different language than it actually is. This has disastrous consequences, for example if a German page focusing on German language readers gets a highly disproportionate amount of links from english language sites, what happens is that Google ignores the fact the server is in Germany, the tld is .de, the meta language tag is “de” and considers the site english and you will drop a lot in google.de but rise in Google.com.

This is some interesting information. I am working a lot in both English and Hebrew and may test that in the near future. Updates to come.

Yahoo has added their own version of sitemaps, but this time created a simplified version. No need for special tools, nor XML knowledge. Just a simple text file with one address listed in each line.

To submit go here: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. As you may notice they added the following line:

You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz.

Source: SEORoundtable

After advertisers calling Google over and over to raise the amount of Adsense channels allowed per advertiser, they announced today that Adsense now supports 200 channels.

If you weren’t sure how you were going to track the performance of all of your new pages, your worries are over! We’ve increased the number of AdSense channels available to you, up to 200 active channels at any one time. Use your extra channels to compare the performance of your different ad units, of various page layouts, or to track the results of your optimization experiments.

This feature will allow advertisers a lot more options in tracking their ads performance. For example on this site I currently have 3 different ad blocks with 3 different channels, which allows me a greater control as well as tracking.

With the beta release of YPN! and in an attempt to “keep up with the emerging competition” Google has added an interesting new feature to Adsense called Section Targeting, as reviewed by Jansense:

Section targeting allows you to essentially declare certain parts of the on-page content as off-limits to the mediapartners bot, effectively allowing you to target the mediabot with only the content you want it to. This will also allow you to set certain sections on a page - such as navigational menus and header/footer areas - as not being considered for ad targeting by the bot.

Setting it up is done by adding “comment tags” to your html code in the following manner:

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore)
to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

<html><head><title>Section targeting</title></head>

<body>

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

This is the text of your web page. Most of your content resides here.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

</body>

</html>

They also took into consideration the notion that this feature may be used for spam and state that tags can only be used to “emphasize or downplay” various parts of the page, so it seems that other parts of the page are taken into account to check for further relevancy.

I am still working on setting up the different channels on my different blogs to work with my templates, but as soon as I am done with all setups I think this feature can add a great deal to content sites.