Cool clip from the new feature series “red band” in the local cable network  - very cool for SEO’s…

Who’s managing The Internet?

Google Insights for Search has launched today. Well, Google dudes did it again. Taking data based on the Google Trends product, and giving it the twist marketers really need, Google just launched a very interesting service called Google Insights for Search.

We’ve seen similar services from Compete, Quantcast and Hitwise, however Google’s way of presenting the data, connecting it to the keyword research world combined with the marketing segmentation by vertical, location and related searches, really brings more light into keywords research.

Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search is not the typical keyword research tool. It will not give you hundreds of thousands of new keyword phrases, will not give exact search volume (yet) but it will give you great insight as to trends, related searches, demographics and competitive rank for a term vs. its industry index.

So what is Google Insights for Search?

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames

The information is then segmented by:

Categories: Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports.
Seasonality: Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly.
Geographic distribution: Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.

In the following example you can see how the term “hotels in new york” can be seen differently if we’re looking at the whole world vs. only USA:

You can see that the trend is opposite between the two geographic segments! While in the whole world, the term used is now decreasing vs. the selected vertical, in USA it’s actually above the industry!

From the little I can see after playing with this tool, I can definitely say that Google Insights for Search delivers the promise its name hold. It provides insights for search

Enjoy…
Ophir

Google Affiliate Network…. sounds interesting? Well this is now no longer a thought, no longer an assessment of Google’s direction - it’s an official name they have given to the new product Google is releasing, based on DoubleClick Performics platform they got in the DoubleClck deal.

Google Affiliate Network:

As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork

Last night I got some 5 or 6 email from different Google services to my accounts and subscriptions, each mentioned this new product from a different angle. Here are a few:

Google is retiring Adsense Referrals Program

“Retiring” is a much nicer way to spell out “cancelling” or “revoking”. The Adsense Referrals program is widely used by webmsters nd IMO has been a very important part of the success of the Adsense Program.

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:…    * Google Affiliate Network: …

Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term.  For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Google is retiring the pay per action Beta

Thank you for participating in the pay-per-action beta. We’re writing to let you know that in the last week of August 2008, the AdWords pay-per-action beta test will be retired. Pay-per-action campaigns and all related data will be removed from all AdWords accounts the last week of October.

Starting the last week in August, your pay-per-action campaigns will no longer be active, and any ads in your campaigns will stop running. As a result, you will no longer be able to edit or create pay-per-action campaigns.

Important note: You will still be charged for conversions that occur up to 30 days after a click on a pay-per-action ad. To learn more, visit http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6349.

* Starting the last week in October, your pay-per-action campaigns and all related data will be removed from your AdWords account. This includes pay-per-action reports in the Report Center. After this time you will no longer have access to your pay-per-action campaign data. If you wish to retain a permanent record of your pay-per-action campaign data, please export your data from the Report Center using the directions at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=97265.

Well, that’s about it for now - I will now submit to the new network and see how it looks - be sure to expect some insights in the near future…
Ophit

We’re now already three weeks in the clifinar SEO contest and in my opinion it gets more interesting with time goes by. Now, that the search engines are crawling and indexing this new term for three weeks, the results count on Google.com is over 10,000 results, and more importantly - the obvious, easy and fast SEO tricks are all in, and it really starts to show creativity and quality in the SERP’s.

I want to take this post and devote it to a few clifinar players which I found to be playing the game, learning from it and collaborative enough to share their findings with the rest of us. The most interesting ones will also get a link from this post:

• Dana’s clifinar
• Shimrit’s clifinar
• Naomi’s clifinar

clifinar SEO contest video review:

Clifinar SEO Contest Review - More free videos are here

Read More »

Some of the clifinar contest players have Hebrew on their PC’s, therefore it must happen to them every now and then that they try to type and english word like clifinar and instead write בךןכןמשר

בךןכןמשר

Is the word clifinar typed with the same keys when they keyboard is set to Hebrew. That’s a real bummer because usually it makes you write with mistakes. We sometime use such spellings and typo’s in PPC campaigns and drive really cheap and really good traffic to our clients as usually this weird wrd will be the only relevant result for such a page.

back to…

clifinar

clifinar really makes me happy. To see a term with zero results turn to 2560 results is ~7 days is really cool and shows us the endless possibilities for publishing content on the Internet, for free.

It does take lots of thinking, dedication, devotion, practice, trial and error and of course - luck - yes! we need luck!!!

So good luck all -

OC