The web can be a dangerous place; there are threats around every corner. In recent years, threats coming from web pages have significantly increased, from malicious programs hosted on web pages, to downloads that manipulate your computer and steal your personal information. In the past, these threats mainly came from questionable websites, but today even reputable sites can turn bad, which means that everyone is at risk for malware.

Live Search’s announced that while crawling the web, Live Search assess whether a page contains any malicious element or exhibits any malicious behavior, and then flag questionable pages with a warning message:

“Our primary goal is to protect you from a potentially harmful page. You can still decide to risk it and visit the page, but we strongly urge against it and recommend always following our security guide Protect Your Computer.”

“If a reputable web page has been flagged, the website has most likely been abused by a malicious third party. On the Live Search Webmaster Center blog, we provide webmasters with information on how to fix and secure their websites from future abuse. We also encourage webmasters to sign up for our Webmaster Tools, which can alert them when malicious content on detected on their site.”

Christian Seifert, Software Design Engineer, Live Search Anti-Spam & Anti-Malware Team

Source:http://blogs.msdn.com/

Comment – Great improvement! Users should always be aware that cybercriminals are taking advantage of web services. Many people will be protected with these warnings. Google and Yahoo have also recently started notifying malicious element.

Google has announced a new service that will be adding magazines to its Google Book Search service. As posted by Dave Foulser, Software Engineer on Officaial Google Blog:

We’re announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.

This is another step by Google to capture information market. Various rare archives would be made available to public which were not available before thus opening new dimension for the users.

Google have now updated their ad policy for hard alcohol and liquer targeting the U.S. The UK will follow suit in the coming weeks.

Google had already quietly changed their policy at the end of October allowing PPC ads for beer. However according to the Inside Adwords blog the new rules are for promotion and branding rather than direct sale which are still not allowed -

“To comply with the updated hard alcohol and liqueurs policy, advertisers must promote the information about hard alcohol and liqueurs that their websites contain, such as recipes and brand messages. Ads that directly promote the sale of hard alcohol and liqueurs are still not permissible through our program. In contrast, advertisements for beer may directly promote its sale.“

The news comes after Google firstly removed their keyword trademark policy in the UK and then permitted advertising for online gambling in the UK, Italy, France and Spain.

Google have finally given advertisers the ability to assign different levels of access to users of their Adwords accounts. The new Roles and Permissions Beta being introduced across all countries and languages, allows advertisers to offer three levels of access to users - Administrative, Standard, and Reports. Google explain the Beta in the below paragraph :

Roles and Permissions Beta

We are excited to test a new Beta Feature for the Google AdWords Program that helps you manage your AdWords account security and privacy.(this update is a little old - it has now passed the pilot & is a permanent feature).With this test, advertisers and agencies have the ability to assign three different user access levels for each AdWords account - Administrative, standard, and reports. These new access levels increase security by allowing you to assign or remove the level of access from anyone you want. Also, these new access levels maintain privacy by ensuring recipients get email appropriate to the user’s access level.

* Reports Access is the most important feature for agencies like us as it grants ‘read-only’ access of an account to us. As we generally require an account’s access to analyze it & make a proposal, this would help us in case a prospective client is skeptical about we making changes in his account before he hands over the management to us.

This is a positive move by Google, although it’s not before time. Yahoo, who have traditionally been the slower of the two engines to offer innovative features to advertisers, included this feature in their new Panama interface. Google have been quite slow in offering a feature that many advertisers, particularly agencies whose clients often request access to their accounts, feel is vital to the smooth running of a campaign (and harmony between clients / account managers!!). Still, Adwords now has read-only account access, and this can only be a good thing.

One can follow this link to read more:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70619

Google Adwords has changed the way the Campaign Summary and Ad Group Summary pages in an account present statistics. This is in order to give additional level of detail into a campaign’s performance. Previously, these pages divided statistics into two categories: search, which included Google and search partners, and the content network.

Now, they show one set of statistics for Google and another set aggregating search partner performance. Search partners include AOL, Ask.com, and many other search sites around the web. One can view ad group or campaign performance at a summary level, or broken down by different combinations of Google, their search partners, and their content network. Additionally, separate Google and aggregate search partner statistics will soon be available in the Report Center.

Earlier this year, Google Suggest finally made it to the Google home page. The feature suggests queries as you begin typing in the search box. Now Google is testing providing links to web sites, direct answers and even ads that appear within the Google Suggest list.

Not everyone will see these changes. Google’s showing them to a small, randomly selected group of people in the US. The experiment might end at any time and not necessarily become a permanent feature.

The most dramatic change is the inclusion of AdWords ads in this box. Here are some of the ones that have been spotted:
In the one above, typing the characters [new...] gave an ad for Newsweek. On continueing on, doing [new york t...], rather than seeing a link to the New York Times as with the example shown earlier, this ad from the New York Times itself was shown.
And here’s yet another ad that appeared on typing [up...]:

For one thing, it’s way too easy for people to click on an ad to reach a web site where Google should be sending them to for free. So, this is yet another means the giant has worked out to pocket dollars !

This update relates to images being included in a normal PPC ad displayed on SERPs. Till date, we used to have the option of running image/banner PPC ads on Google’s Content Network. However, this is something different Google has come up with.

Some AdWords ads on Google are now showing associated images — and getting much larger in the space they take up — through a “Show products from” Plus Box implementation that some are seeing now when searching at Google.

For instance, trying to search for bluenile, brings up a Blue Nile ad. Under the usual ad title and description is a plus symbol (called a Plus Box), followed by the words, “Show products from Blue Nile for bluenile.” If one clicks on the box, it opens up three product listings from Blue Nile, each listing with an associated image.

The most striking part of this ad is that how much room it takes up. Below is how the ad looks when it is closed:

When one clicks to open up the product results, the whole visible part of the page is consumed with this one ad. Here is an image of just the ad, that measures about 370 pixels tall :

The ad also shows on the right hand side. This implementation is better for some because it does not change how the natural/free results are shown but rather only pushes down other ads on the right hand side.

Images associated with search ads are not too surprising. We have seen implementations of video ads in Adwords several times. It just seems that Google is willing to try anything now when it comes to ads, from video to images to multimedia and who knows what.

Source URL : http://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-now-with-images-15242

Comments: Though this would give a good reason for advertisers to go in for sponsored ads, the downside it could have is that such ads on the right hand side might shift other sponsored ads on the 2nd or subsequent pages. This could increase the competitiveness of keywords further as advertisers will have to bid higher to sustain their ads on the first page even after such ads are opened up & viewed. This could be a killer in this sense!

Introduction to the update: This update mainly pertains to two main changes that Google has decided to come up with in order to rank ads better. First one being more precise quality score calculation & the second one is promoting more & more high quality ads in the yellow region above organic results.

Google has recently launched the improvements to Ads Quality that they announced in Nov, 2008. These improvements better evaluate the precise quality of your ads and improve the way they determine which ads show in the yellow region above the search results.

Google also wanted to emphasize that AdWords has always accounted for the influence of ad position on CTR and removed it from the Quality Score. This specific improvement updates this system to make it fresher and more accurate.

Though any immediate changes are not needed on the advertisers’ part, but Google encourages them as always to watch their key metrics and to make adjustments as appropriate.

Following are the two major changes Google has decided to bring in:

More precise Quality Score calculation

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the most significant component of Quality Score because it directly indicates which ads are most relevant to our searchers. As you probably have observed, ads in high positions typically earn better CTR than those in low positions, because ads in high positions are more visible to searchers. To calculate the most accurate Quality Scores, it’s important that the influence of ad position on CTR be taken into account and removed from the Quality Score.

In the coming days, we’ll update the portion of the Quality Score algorithm that accounts for ad position. This will result in more accurate Quality Scores, ensure that ads compete fairly for position based on their quality and bid, and enable Google to show the most relevant ads to searchers by rewarding high-quality advertisers with better ad positions.

Higher quality ads above the search results

We’re also improving the way we determine which ads show in the yellow region above the search results. These positions are particularly valuable to advertisers because they are prominently positioned on the page. Given their prominence, it’s especially important that these ads be high quality; we therefore place extra emphasis on quality when determining which ads to show in this location.

To appear above the search results, ads must meet a certain quality threshold. In the past, if the ad with the highest Ad Rank did not meet the quality threshold, we may not have shown any ads above the search results. With this update, we’ll allow an ad that meets the quality threshold to appear above the search results even if it has to jump over other ads to do so. For instance, suppose the ad in position 1 on the right side of the page doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score to appear above the search results, but the ad in position 2 does. It’s now possible for the number 2 ad to jump over the number 1 ad and appear above the search results. This change ensures that quality plays an even more important role in determining the ads that show in those prominent positions.

Source URLs:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/11/update-on-improvements-to-ads-quality.html

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/10/improvements-to-ads-quality.html

Comments: This should certainly prove good for advertisers as well as for users because more ‘good quality’ ads would now show in top slots. Earlier Google used to take ad position as a parameter to calculate ad quality score. However, if this portion of the quality score algorithm is revised, advertisers would be prompted to create quality ads to rank on top rather than only assigning high bids to keywords in order to rank high. This would certainly create value & refine PPC advertising further.

Introduction: This update has been announced by Google on December 9, 2008. It talks about running Sponsored ads on iphones & other mobile devices. One has the option of opting in & out of this through campaign settings options. This would not require any changes in the ad format or the way campaigns are structured. It is just about an additional platform that is being offered. Read below for details on the same:

Google has recently added a new option under campaign settings.

Under Networks and bidding, there’s a section entitled Device Platform that has two options:

• Desktop and laptop computers.
• IPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers.

Google define full browsers as “those that can show standard HTML web pages and can support a user making a purchase from start to finish, including supporting any tracking or Analytics functionality on e-commerce pages”.

It is advised to note that this doesn’t include WAP browsers.

Source URL : http://www.sharewarepromotions.com/adwords/index.asp#e098

Comments: The issue with this new functionality is that it is enabled by default. In the true sense, not many of our customers are likely to search for goods via their iPhone. So the best thing would have been to allow the user to go & opt into this feature if required, rather than enabling it by default when a new campaign is set up.

AdWords Trademark Policy Revision (UK and Ireland) –(Mainly relates to trademark infringement in keywords & ad copies)

Introduction: This update is about the way an advertiser needs to file a complain against trademark infringement in UK or Ireland. It has now been made inline with the policy in US & Canada.

Google team writes that they are changing their trademark complaint procedure in the UK and Ireland. This change may affect how they handle the trademark complaint advertisers currently have on file with Google.

If one has submitted a complaint letter requesting that Google prevents advertisers from using certain trademark terms anywhere in their ad text, Google will continue their efforts to support the request. However, since May 5, 2008, their trademark complaint investigations have no longer been resulting in Google monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This will bring their procedure in line with the approach taken in the US and Canada.

One does not need to file a trademark complaint with Google again unless it is required to amend it based on the new guidelines.

Source URL:

http://www.ppcblog.co.uk/google-adwords/google-changing-trademark-policy-in-the-uk/

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=92877&hl=en_US.

Comments: This is a good change brought in by Google in order to streamline their policy across all countries. Previously, the policy used to be different for US/Canada & UK/Ireland; however it would now be the same all across which would ensure standardization.