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Earlier in March, Google AdWords announced that landing page load time will become a factor in calculating your Quality Score. Google have now updated AdWords reporting to display this information before it starts to become a Quality Score factor in mid-June.Below I've provided an example of what this looks like for one of our keywords with a "Great" quality score:Scripts - the use of Javascript and other scripts on your page

Some basic tips include; optimizing your images to be less than 50kb, trimming down on excess HTML code, ensuring your site is hosted on a reliable server and minimizing scripts used on your website.

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You may recall the recent partnership between Google and Yahoo!, which saw Yahoo! serving Google paid search ads alongside its own for a period of 2 weeks. The two week trial has now been called a "brilliant test" by Google, who would happily expand the advertising partnership in an effort to prevent Microsoft from renewing their bid.By making sure Yahoo! does well, Google are effectively preventing the company from falling into the hands of Microsoft, who is eager to join with Yahoo! to seriously compete with Google."We were a big partner of Yahoo a few years ago," co-founder Sergey Brin said. "It's great to be working with them again." Google CEO Eric Schmidt also remarked, "We have had a brilliant test which was two weeks long."All these comments are a strong indication from Google that they would love to further expand the advertising deal and contribute to Yahoo!'s success.Aside from assisting Yahoo!'s success, the deal also worked out well for Google in another way, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer commenting that the Google test was one of his reasons for terminating negotiations with Yahoo!:All this means for Google, is that by perusing a long term deal with Yahoo! - they would go a long way towards blocking any further negotiations between Yahoo! and Microsoft.

This post is from from my other blog here

Despite all the negative attention Yahoo! has received lately thanks to its rejection of the Microsoft merger, they have managed to bring some good news with the implementation of a new way of presenting search results called Glue.

Glue Pages, which is currently in Beta form for the newly launched Yahoo! India, combines traditional search results with other related information including Wikipedia entries, stock chart, Flickr images, news and even Google blog search results.

Traditional search results appear in a strip on the left side of the page, which you will see from the image below.

So I guess for now we just cross our fingers and hope it does well enough in India to then allows us all to reap the benefits.

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Google really is the world's biggest search engine! This fact has been further cemented by recent statistics released by ComScore showing that Google commanded 79% of searches across Europe in March 2008.

There seems to be no threat to Google by Yahoo and Microsoft in Europe as they currently hold fourth and fifth place with both only claiming around 2% of market share.

Google Advertising might be just the ticket for your website.

This post is from from my other blog here

There are thousands of different home based business products available on the web today and many have become very popular amongst affiliate advertisers. Over the years I have come across a wide variety of home based affiliate websites; some of which are very clear and a few that have simply confused me.Recently, in a move to weed out some of these lower quality affiliate websites, Google have increased the minimum cost per click for certain over crowded affiliate programs.A few weeks ago one of our Google AdWords Qualified Technicians attempted to setup a campaign in Google AdWords for a common Home Based Business affiliate site and noticed that Google had placed a minimum cost per click of approx $10 on every keyword.The same technician also attempted to use similar keywords for a less known Home Based Business site and to his surprise the minimum cost per click was approximately $0.70. Using Yahoo! Search Marketing proved to be a winner for the sites affected by Google's high cost per click as quality traffic was delivered for approximately $0.50 per click - 1/20 of the price Google wanted.Affiliate advertisers need to ensure they are promoting a high quality affiliate program that delivers real value to consumers. If your program is just a gimmick or hyper competitive it may be best to look at some other alternatives - especially if you're considering Google Advertising for your website.

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It's not entirely clear if this marks the end of the whole episode but it certainly appears to (at least on the surface).

This post is from from my other blog here

iProspect study, 37% of searches are inspired by TV, which means TV can still be a great way to send traffic to your website. As I've said before, I think TV advertising is a great way to compliment search advertising, and the Google TV ads platform makes it very easy to get started.

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Twitter about how the update has impacted various websites.According to reports so far, the update doesn't appear to have impacted rankings too much, just the PageRank value shown in the toolbar. It's important to remember that while this value can give a good indication of your sites progress, the values from toolbar PageRank can be around a month or so old. Google uses real time PageRank values when calculating search results which it releases to the public a month or so later.Many webmasters, who have had their sites penalized to a PR 0 in previous updates, are reporting small gains of 1-2 points with this latest update. If you've recently launched a new website it also might be a good idea to see how you fared. One of our new sites launched in early March got a PageRank for the first time, so the update must have pulled data from after this point.As always share your PageRank changes via our blog comments!