» Lots Of Changes At Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft

There has been a bunch of changes going on the big three search marketing providers, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Instead of posting an entry on each one I’ll just sum them all up in this one post. You may want to head on over to Search Engine Land to get up to date, but here are the highlights from the past couple days:

Google Releases Better Content Removal Tools
Have you made some changes to your site and want to remove some pages from Google’s search index? You can filter it out by adding a disallow entry in your robots.txt file, but now you can expedite the removal request by submiting a removal request on Google’s Webmaster Tools. I’ve been making a bunch of changes on my car forum/community website and I’ve setup my robots.txt to remove lots of pages out of Google’s index. Many of the pages I am removing are duplicate content, so I’ve submitted a removal request to speed things up (it’s been about 4-5 days and pages are still being removed).

Yahoo Adds Shopping Cart Icon to Sponsored Search Results
Merchants advertising on Yahoo Search Marketing that accept paypal payments will now get a little blue shopping cart icon beside their ad just like on Google’s ad units. I’m just wondering, doesn’t everyone and their dog accept paypal payments? I have a feeling in order to stand out in future Yahoo sponsored search results, you’ll have to STOP accepting paypal so you wont get the shopping cart icon as every store will have one.

The icon that Yahoo decided to use looks just like the one Google used, although I guess you can’t really make a shopping cart icon look too different since all shopping carts look pretty much the same. Google responded by redesigning their Google Checkout badges on ad units.

Microsoft Improves Ad Quality Algorithm
The big three are all making changes to their search marketing systems, this time Microsoft is improving the ad quality ranking algorithm to rank ads better based on several factors including ad relevancy to landing page, keyword relevancy to ads and landing page, overall landing page quality. Google has been doing this for ages, and now Microsoft is taking a step in the right direction.

Google introduces Preferred Cost Bidding Option
Google has enabled a new feature on AdWords that allows advertisers to specify a preferred bid cost. Instead of specifying a maximum bid (for both cpc and cpm), advertisers are now able to bid on an average cpc and cpm. This will help stabilize costs for advertisers who do not want to manage their ad campaigns daily adjusting bids. If you plan on using this, hit up the FAQ

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