Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

Askville launched recently and it is a beautiful site. It’s fun to ask and answer questions and you get rewards for doing all of it. A killer app is that you can buy superpowers with the coins you get from asking and answering questions. Addictive, easy to use, fun to use - all site content created by the users. This site should be the poster-child for web 2.0. Amazon seems to be hard at work improving it as well. This should be fun to watch.

Other than as a case study, I don’t know yet how this applies to web marketing, but it’s a great example of something being made out of nothing. This is what Google Answers would have been had they not lost their swagger.

Shoemoney from webmasterradio.fm has a great interview with Brian Axe of AdSense. I was really amazed and impressed with the interview and with Brian.

(edit: I realize this crosses the line from commentary to rant… you’ve been warned)
My experience with adsense hasn’t been a good one from a customer service standpoint. I’ve worked with sites who have been banned without recourse and are left with dealing with under trained Google customer service types who make the Bush’s military tribunals looks like shining examples of defendant rights by comparison.

So in short, my experience with AdSense is that it is a great way to monetize a site, but they are arrogant, monopolistic and tend to stonewall if they suspect you of crossing them. In their defense, they likely deal with people all day trying to defraud them. The question they need to answer is, How many innocents should be punished to catch an offender? Is it better to err on the side of letting people defraud you, or is it better to err on the side of protecting advertising and never being defrauded? I don’t know for sure, but in my small-time, limited sample, Google appears Hitler-like in their treatment of small sites. I’m certain that one innocent was banned and pretty sure that 2 others are being truthful. Notice that Google would never ban anyone with the clout or Soap Box to fight back. My experience is with smallish, niche sites with no option.

All of that aside, the Podcast with AdSense manager Brian Axe was helpful. He discusses these trade offs and talks about changes to adsense policies here (MP3 Link).

My take aways:
- images beside ads tend to increase clicks but not ROI for advertisers and until Google has a way to protect advertisers from that, they will disallow the process
- Google is working on some process to allow publishers to click on their own ads to better understand their visitors experience (I’m very pleased and impressed that Google is addressing this. Axe’s perspective was perfect. In short: we know this should happen; we’re working on it; Until we get it, don’t click the ads)
- from Google’s perspective, the appeals process works great
- smartpricing is probably a good thing (they’re trying to differentiate between quality and low quality clicks… many advertisers avoid the publishers altogether because smartpricing doesn’t work. it should get better)

Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

Google says don’t. They provide a couple of bad examples too. I will say that the examples are pretty obvious. They don’t provide any acceptable examples but they tell you what you can do, as in change the ad colors or put a full border around your ads.

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

SEOmoz Blog | Google News – for traffic, links, and rankings

How to get your site in Google News. The link to submit is http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py

Per an article at WebProWorld:

The Japanese testing of AdWords on mobiles proved successful enough that Google has quietly debuted the service in the US.

This is a bit too bleeding edge for my taste. I pay for mobile content by the kilobite and would resent searching and getting ads instead. It’s hard to be unobtrusive on a small phone screen. Any space used by ads better be done well or else I’m switching. I tend to use Google, but that would drive me away fast.