March 2008 Archives

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 31, 2008"

Adam Audette wrote a brilliant piece on the fundamentals of link building on his blog, and he's right on the money. His core message is that links reflect value, so your linking strategy should focus on finding that valuable link and seeking out the appropriate neighborhoods for gathering such links. The higher the quality of the link, the better it is for you.

I'd summarize the entire post, but it really deserves its own read, your social media bookmarking, and your links too. Seriously. Adam did a great job. He divides his post into how link building has evolved, the components of a quality link, the importance of link neighborhoods, where to begin, and how to perform strategic link building.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

What would you consider a better scenario? Would you rather be below the fold on page one or above the fold on page two of the search results? If so, why?

The answer may depend on your wants and needs. On DigitalPoint Forums, a forum member is saying that he's getting a lot less traffic in the #10 ranking than in the #11th position.

While few don't see a difference between page 1 and page 2, many say that page one is obviously better. It gives you incentive to work towards ranking even higher on page one. And that should be a goal you shouldn't sit on -- it's a consistent work in progress.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Jill Whalen discovered through several site audits that Google appears to have merged the index page with the root page of the domain. In other words, if your www.domain.com was the same as www.domain.com/index.html and you still linked to www.domain.com/index.html, Google is now seeing these pages as one and the same versus in the past where they would treat them as two separate pages and even split toolbar PageRank.

It may be an issue of the duplicate content filter on Google finally kicking in, which can take awhile, according to forum member Ron Carnell.

However, Jill has noticed it on the last five site audits she performed, so it's possible that it's something that Google is now putting into effect -- at least for now. Ron mentions that Google has once merged www.domain.com and domain.com but then unmerged it, so it may only be a temporary change.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

YahooPete has visited the forums over the weekend and has announced that Yahoo! Search Marketing's customer support hours have changed. The new hours are:

Monday – Friday: 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time

Saturday: 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time

Sunday: Closed

The number for the support team is (866) 924-6676.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, and WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread has dozens of reports that Yahoo Search's crawler, Yahoo Slurp, took some bad medicine recently. Many are reporting that they see the crawler spidering their sites like never before. Some times they have seen the spider multiple to over a 1,000 crawls at one time.

The first report claimed about 500 Yahoo spiders:

I have a forum and I get 500+ (sometimes 800+) Yahoo spiders daily. Why is there so many? I only get 1 or 2 Google spiders.

Others reported similar cases with much more Yahoo spider activity then Google spider activity. These reports seemed to have died down recently.

The initial report came at Friday afternoon and then died out Saturday afternoon. So maybe it was just a temporary Yahoo glitch?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Yahoo sent me a statement update this behavior:

On March 29th and 30th, some of you have noticed Yahoo! Slurp spidering your website more than usual – this temporary blip was inadvertently caused by a major crawl infrastructure upgrade we have been doing for last 1 month.

While the Yahoo! Slurp should be stable now, if you continue to notice unreasonable traffic from Yahoo! spiders, please provide feedback at the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Thanks,

Yahoo! Search Team

It seems like you can now request to join the pilot Microsoft ContentAds program as a publisher. Currently, there was really no public method to request to show Microsoft ContentAds, via the adCenter content network, on your site. But now, there appears to be a form at http://advertising.microsoft.com/publisher that you can sign up at.

By completing the form, you have a chance at:

• To keep informed about new developments
• Receive invitations to participate in focus groups or feedback sessions
• And most importantly, possibly be considered for participation in an upcoming pilot program

So does this mean that Microsoft will soon be opening up their publisher program and be competing directly with Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network? If Microsoft opens up the program soon, they can likely take away publishers from Yahoo. Yahoo is still closed to non-US based publishers.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The world was abuzz about Google.com going black around the world at 8pm local time. It happened a bit earlier at Google Israel, and then Saturday night it went black again:

Why? For Earth Hour.

Google users in the United States will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don't do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Ironically, for me to take that screen capture, I had to have my lights on to power my computer. In any event, we have lots of forum reaction to Google going dark.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Cre8asite Forums.

Google China seems to be highlighting the query term in the search results in red, instead of just bolding the query term, like was done in the past. For example, a search on search engine roundtable at Google China returns all matches of the keyword phrase on the page in red. Here is a screen capture:

Let's compare this to a search at Google.com:

Wonder why Google China is going with the red highlights, as opposed to the normal bolding highlighting?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

As reported, Google held their first live chat even hosted by the Google Webmaster Help team. I listened and participated in the live chat event, and I can personally attest that it was a huge success. I believe there were well over 200 attendees, maybe almost 300.

It was hosted using an 800# call in, to hear the Googlers. Plus a WebEx plugin to view slides, video and two methods of chat. The first was a general chat area, which Matt Cutts spent most of his time in. He even helped out this webmaster who had his site recently hacked (it was nice to see). The second chat area was reserved for Q&A, webmasters submitted questions and Googlers answered them either live or via the chat.

I did copy the transcripts of each chat area, and I was going to post it today, but no need to. Googler, JohnMu, posted both transcripts in Google Groups, so if you missed what went down, check it out there.

If you have questions about the transcripts or have feedback on the live chat event, use this Google Groups thread, started by MattD.

I was told by one webmaster that they were recording the audio and they would email it to me. But I have not yet received a copy of that audio. If you have it, I would love to add it to this post.

It appears to me that Google will be hosting the events more regularly. It seemed like almost every Googler associated with web search and webmasters was on board (maybe we were missing Brian White?). But it seemed like they were all there, all helping webmasters. A great thing to see - like I said before. Kudos Google and great job!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Postscript: John posted audio recordings of the chat session. Check them out over here.

The huge WebmasterWorld thread devoted to tracking Google changes over the course of March 2008 has sprung some late March legs. Reseller, well known at WebmasterWorld for tracking the slightest changes at Google, posted two data centers that are very different.

The two data centers that appears to be shuffling around include:

• 72.14.207.104
• 64.233.183.104

Reseller jokes:

May be the folks at Google Search Quality Team are focusing this weekend at improving the search relevancy at the top ;-)

Google's constantly updating their search index and results, but this update seems to be pretty major. We do not know yet if it will propagate through to the main Google.com results.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: I am getting word that many folks are seeing the dramatic changes at the main Google.com results. I personally don't see the 72.14.207.104 data center hitting the Google.com results for me, but many are now.

In this week's video recap of the Weekly Search Buzz we announced the winner of the prize from last week's video recap, plus I chatted about some of the most interesting and important discussions around the search industry.

This week's video recap is a summary of the Weekly Search Buzz RoundUp - 03/28/08: YouTube Video Statistics, Google Demographics Targeting & Video Ads on Google and Yahoo. In this video edition I discussed YouTube Insights, Google Demographic bidding, Google Video ads the Live Search update and much more. So check it out:

To win a prize, you need to comment below and rate the video at YouTube.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 28, 2008"

Happy Friday everyone! It's officially spring out here; the weather has gotten warmer and it's almost April! Wow.

Easter!

Yeah, that's right. Last week was Easter. And there were plenty of celebrations in the search sphere.

YouTube Analytics

Probably the coolest thing (for me) that happened this week was the announcement that YouTube is now providing analytics on their videos. I know Avinash Kaushik would be proud. It is very cool to see how well your videos are doing, and Barry provides a nice screenshot tour of the various options you can take advantage of. Sweet.

Google AdWords Demographic Bidding Screenshots

Barry has been in a screenshot mood lately. After the announcement about Google's demographic targeting for AdWords advertisers, he provides Google AdWords demographic bidding screenshots as well. You can see traffic reports by gender, age, and more.

We Asked You What You Thought About Minus X Penalties

....and most of you thought it was backlink related. In other words, the links pointing to your site may be causing a drop in your rankings. Even Barry thinks so.

New Google Mobile

A spy blogger journalist dude from ZDNet was snooping around examining Google's robots.txt file and found Google's new mobile interface. It's actually quite cool; it knows where you're located and gives you popular attractions. Of course, if you're not a tourist, the results Google provides may not help you, but a big chunk of folks are probably looking for something on that map. (For the others, Google, personalized search!)

Microsoft Live Search March 2008 Update

The March 2008 update of Live Search has left webmasters really upset at the quality of results. One even likens it to "split personalities." Not good.

Google Sitelinks March 2008 Update

On a similar note, Google is performing updates of its own. I finally have sitelinks, albeit they're ... interesting.

New Versions

Some advertisers have been invited to the new Microsoft adCenter Editor Beta. No word on performance issues yet.

On Google's end, Google AdWords API version 12 is now live, and you have until July 26 to switch over. Speaking of deadlines, it's almost April 1st, and the Google AdWords display URL policy is going into effect then. Check your campaigns carefully as soon as possible if you haven't already.

Video Ads Come to Google and Yahoo

It looks like other search engines are jumping in the video ad game. Google came out with AdWords video ads and Yahoo now has Partner Results. Life is changing and it's all video, baby. (I am not sure if I'm impressed.) ;)

Do Search Boxes in Google Search Results Increase Traffic?

The answer is maybe. Search boxes in the SERPs increase traffic astronomically, according to one person who was fortunate enough to get a search box on his site. The "traffic doubled overnight," he says. Others disagree, though. So time will only tell if it helps or hurts.

No, You CANNOT Blend Your Ads

The Google AdSense team has officially provided guidelines saying no to blending ads with your content. Will they enforce it? Hard to say. Keep watching this site. ;)

10 Minutes Until Google Time

You have about 10 minutes until you can join the Google Webmaster Help Live Chat depending on when this post gets published and when you read it. Don't miss it!

Welcome Brian and Suman

Finally, I'd like to welcome AdSensePro reps Brian and Suman who hail from Ireland and India, respectively. It's nice to have global assistance when you need it. :)

Have a great weekend!

Lately, we've heard a lot about the need for search marketing standards. Most people that I've encountered are overwhelmingly supportive of such a move.

Not Jill Whalen, however. Over at Search Engine Land, she provides her four reasons as to why we shouldn't go that direction. Her reasons: there's no "one size fits all" solution to SEO, the definition of "SEO" is not agreed upon entirely by the community, laws already exist that protect consumers from SEO scams, and there's no such thing as "cheating" in SEO.

At High Rankings Forum, people are largely supportive of Jill this time around. One even puts it this way: "standardizing SEO is like standardizing art."

But Ian McAnerin, who spoke at the Search Marketing Standards session I liveblogged during SMX West, disagrees with her. His blog post addresses this (note: there are two parts) and he feels that the standards are more for the public's understanding of SEO, not for SEOs themselves.

In the end, it may be two different discussions entirely. We may need to standardize this debate. ;)

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

At a Cre8asite Forums thread, a user is looking for guidance on how to compile a SEO strategic document. What would be contained in such a document?

The first step in writing a document like this is determining your audience and asking who is going to read this strategy document. Once that's set, you can think of other goals, particularly the company goals and the departmental goals.

But be careful. Don't make promises you can't deliver:

I'd also try to be easy on predicting awesome sales. It is better to underestimate and be a winner later, then overestimate now and be seen as underachiever. Even if in the latter variant, you've done exceptionally well.

What do you think? Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums -- and the final outline for the SEO strategies document is revealed.

Want an official Google robots.txt generator? You have one. Yesterday, the Google Webmaster Central blog announced the launch of a new tool in Google Webmaster Central, the robots.txt generator.

Here's what it looks like:

You'll then need to download it and save it as your robots.txt file. (Be advised that you'll probably overwrite your current robots.txt file if you already have one.)

For now, forum response is supportive of the tool, but the big wish is that wildcards be supported in the future.

Danny Sullivan has written more about the tool at Search Engine Land, where he walks you through the process and explains the syntax of a basic robots.txt file.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google AdWords advertiser at WebmasterWorld reports that he used to pay $0.15 per click on his ads but recently his quality score forced him to up the price of his AdWords ads to $10. He'd like to know if there's any way to recover from such a high jump.

An interesting discussion has emerged as a result of this question. Some people believe it's not possible, but it also depends on what kind of site you are hosting. If, for example, it's an ebook site, a "get rich quickly" site, comparison shopping engines, travel aggregators, or data collection sites, you're probably out of luck.

Others speak from experience: one has had 2 of 4 sites recovered from what he believes to be a quality score algorithm change. And some others believe that it impacts the entire account and that you need to fix the entire account before proceeding with the actual problematic keyword.

One person has circumvented this by migrating his data to another brand new campaign. He then waits to get slapped again with high CPCs at which point he moves to another brand new campaign.

Other suggestions speak from experience and users trying to make sense of it all. They call it AdWords Engine Optimization.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

The other day we reported on the March 2008 Live Search update. Most of the feedback was that Microsoft took a step backwards in relevancy and spam and their new index is poor, to say the least.

MSNDude, Microsoft's Live Search representative at WebmasterWorld came into the forum thread and completely violated them. He asked for specifics and we all know that WebmasterWorld does not allow specifics. He asked:

I am looking into this and could use some sample queries where you are seeing problems. I have tried the "cheap hotels" example, but I could use some more specific examples to test with.

Please post the term and the query link and we will take a look.

Soon after, the moderator of the forum told members not to post specifics, but it was too late. Some of the example queries include:

• lower my car payments
• vista
• cutts
• bush
• ballmer

The moderator asks you to Sticky Mail MSNDude instead, so here is a quick link to email MSNDude via WebmasterWorld. Send him good examples so he can have the engineers look into improving the index.

As you can tell, I like picking on Microsoft.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

One of the most successful Google AdSense optimization strategies was to make your Google AdSense ads look as if they are part of your site content or navigation. This strategy is commonly referred to as blending your ads into your site design.

Now, there are many grades of blending your AdSense ads. There are ways to do it where you can not tell the difference between the ad and your content and there are less extreme cases. Google AdSense posted a clarification that some of these techniques are not acceptable. Google said:

• Ads shouldn't be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
• Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

It is important to note that Google does not call these "suggestions," they call them "guidelines."

Google shows specific examples in their post so it is crystal clear what they mean. Personally, I never liked sites that blended those ads so deeply in. But the main goal of those sites was monetization of the AdSense ads. I wonder how this will impact publishers, advertisers and Google's net.

A WebmasterWorld thread has some feedback from members. I'll quote the passages I like:

Well, it's only the opposite of the previous guideline ;-D

See Google's AdSense Heat Map for why people might think this.

I'm thinking Google itself used to be in violation with these guidelines (sponsor results below the search box). Certainly sites like Ask and AOL seem to be in violation.

Yes, AOL and Ask are paid search partners and they blend those Google ads right into their search results. Here is a screen capture of the Google ads on Ask.com, next to an organic result. Very hard to tell which is paid and which is free:

Let's see if Google stats to truly enforce this guidelines now. It will be interesting to watch all the forum threads on this topic.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Googler, JohnMu, posted a Google Groups thread telling everyone that Google is aware of the verification issue in Google Webmaster Tools and not to worry. He said:

I just wanted to give a short heads-up that we're aware of the issue with site verification in Webmaster Tools. The team is working on it, so you should all be able to take a deeper look into your site's indexing through Webmaster Tools soon! If your site was unverified, it will generally have no impact on any settings or statistics in your account. They will all be back once your site is re-verified.

I'm sorry for the disruption and hope to see you all in our chat tomorrow!

So no need to worry, everything should return to normal, if you are impacted by this.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

YouTube and Google both announced YouTube Insights, a new way to see more detailed statistics on your YouTube videos. I did a detailed post at Search Engine Land on the topic. If you have YouTube videos, you can see the stats by going to the my videos link and clicking on "about this video" button. Here is a screen shot of the button:

Now, my most popular video by far is the iPhone Popcorn Trick where I wrote that my iPhone can make popcorn. Here is that video:

Here is the YouTube Insights stats overview for this video:

Let's zoom in on the chart on the left and expand it to a year to see views for the past year:

Here is the video popularity compared to other videos across the year time span:

Views plotted on the world map:

Here are pictures (slide show format) of the views by continent:

Why is it so popular? Well, YouTube Insights currently doesn't show referral data but I have a feeling that is coming. I know why this video is so popular. Due to universal search and the video ranking number on in Google for searches similar to iphone popcorn.

Love the stats we have so far and looking forward to referral data YouTube!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Like most PPC campaign systems, there is a default cap at how many keywords, ad groups and so on you can have per account. Microsoft adCenter has their limits to:

• Keywords: 10,000 per adGroup
• Ads: 20 per adGroup
• Keyword Account Limit: 100,000

So you can basically max out your keyword list on a per account level to 100,000 keywords. I suspect a phone call to Microsoft, if needed, can help increase that limit, but I am not 100% sure about that.

adCenterRep adds he is "I am happy to assist" those with questions at a WebmasterWorld thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 27, 2008"

Julie Joyce writes on the SEO Chicks blog talks about the American Express believes that SEO is a waste of money. The idea is that there are snake oil salesmen (not all SEOs do this, though), but it ends up affecting the industry as a whole. Just because someone promised "guaranteed top 10 rankings in 90 days" doesn't mean he's doing it right or ethically. The industry shouldn't take a hit for that, but unfortunately, they do.

Julie says that you shouldn't give out bad advice as it's extremely irresponsible.

Yes, there are examples of poor SEO but that’s absolutely no reason to advise all small business owners against employing the services of reputable people who happen to have the background and the knowledge to compete in the online arena.

And she ends the article with a bang: that bad advice isn't much better than bad SEO. So there, AMEX.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Ann Smarty has written a post at Search Engine Journal about how the mindset of webmasters who launch sites with and without SEO in mind. If SEO is a priority, choose a relevant domain name and think over website structure. Of course, that's how you'd approach it if search engines were important.

But what if they weren't?

If search engines didn't exist (or rather, you'd like the search engines to find you instead), you wouldn't care about indexing the site immediately and you certainly wouldn't submit your site to search engines. You wouldn't update your content that quickly. Instead, you'd search for alternative traffic sources, like blog comments.

She has a good point. As Barry Welford says, "Simply put it’s getting the fundamentals right then watching it grow." Eventually, it will, but technicalities may not have to be at the forefront of your thought process.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Google has announced that it has launched the newest version of the AdWords API: version 12. Release notes are here, but include the following new features:

• Conversion Optimizer support
• CPC bidding for placement-targeted ads
• Expanded code sample library

Version 11 will be discontinued on July 26, 2008, so if you're an AdWords API developer: upgrade soon rather than later.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld member asks about the frequency of Quality Index updates on Yahoo Search Marketing.

The answer is that the Quality Index updates daily provided that your ad has served impressions the day before.

How can you maximize your Quality Index? The Yahoo Search Marketing blog gives some insight into this value. Some tips include using relevant keywords, applying the keyword to your creative, taking advantage of excluded keywords, using A/B testing, gathering intelligence, and offering specials.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Monday we reported that Google Webmaster Central Team to Offer Live Chat on Friday, March 28th. As promised, I am updating you with the how to join details of this live chat session. Google's Adam Lasnik posted a bunch of details at Google Groups, throughout a few pages.

Here is the FAQ which has the agenda and instructions. Let me summarize:

8:45 (PST) :: You can now join the chat
9:05 (PST) :: The introduction by the Googlers
9:15 (PST) :: Site Clinic (you submit your site)
9:40 (PST) :: Advanced topic: Images in search results by Maile Ohye
9:50 (PST) :: Additional Q&A time
10:00 (PST) :: Hang Up Your Phone (The End)

How To Join The Chat:

It appears Google is powering the chat and conference call via Webex. So to get the Webex meeting URL, you have to go here Friday morning. It won't be posted until then, I don't think. Then when you get to that sign in URL, you will be asked for your name and e-mail address. WebEx will then install it's software on your computer. Webex will then aid you in calling in, but you can call 1-866-469-3239 or if you are international you can use one of these numbers.

It appears you will not be allowed to speak on the phone. You can listen to the Googler's talk, chat with other listeners and then type your questions to a Googler during the Q&A.

Any questions? If so, use this Google Groups thread to ask them and don't forget, if you want your site reviewed, submit it here.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

There are many reports via DigitalPoint Forums that Google has added the Sitelinks feature to many new sites.

Tamar even mentioned to me yesterday that a search on tamar weinberg now returns Sitelinks for her site.

The last Google Sitelinks update was about a month ago on February 22nd.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

One of the oldest questions in the search engine optimization practice is on the META description. The META description is this little tag you include in the header file, that provides a machine readable short summary of your page. Many search engines including Google, Yahoo, & Live Search use the META description in one way or an other. Here is a screen capture of what our META description looks like within the source code of a page:

A Cre8asite Forums thread has a recent discussion that probes into the META description and how it impacts the search engine snippet. The search engine snippet is the piece of content found directly under the blue hyperlink of the search results listings. Here is the search engine snippet in Google for a search on search engine roundtable:

Yes, in this case it matches my META description but not always. If you search for barry schwartz you get this alternative description for this site:

Google and most engines, try to match the content of your search and then apply a more contextually relevant snippet to your query. In the case of "barry schwartz," Google noticed that "barry" and "schwartz" were both not mentioned in the META description, so it proceeded to look for content on the page that matched. What it found was the word "barry" in the little links under each post, in the alt and title tag text:

Ron Carnell, Cre8asite Forums Administrator, makes an interesting observation, which seems to be true:

In every single instance in my experience, putting the search terms in a meta-description sentence resulted in THAT sentence being used in the snippet as soon as the page was crawled. Every instance.

Got that?

Anyway, the forum thread also touches on topics such as why a search engine doesn't use anchor text when developing a search snippet? It also asks how we, webmasters, would want to extend the META description. I love Cre8asite Forum Modertor, EGOL's response:

Looking forward... maybe some day search engines will be able to pass query information to websites. If a person searches for "Bluenote Widgets" perhaps the search engine could pass those words to my website and there would be an easy to install tool that make them appear in highlight on my page... or maybe the link to my page would dropdown to the occurrence of those words on my page. These links could be tiny icons beneath the snippet. Searchers would click them if they want the highlighting or the dropdown anchor.

EGOL's first answer is a lot like how the Google Co-Op works to allow webmasters to trigger certain search results for trusted searchers:

By the way, do subscribe to our Google coop subscriber links.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Continue reading "Daily Search Forum Recap: March 26, 2008"

A WebmasterWorld thread has a horror story about how difficult it seems to take PPC data out of Yahoo! Search Marketing and port it to another account. In this particular case, the person is trying to detach from a search agency and migrate the information elsewhere. Is it possible?

It seems that the answer to that is no.

Werty speaks about his own experience with his switch over to Panama. According to him, when that happened, one of his clients had master account privileges to all his other confidential accounts of his clients and in the end, there was a huge issue with trust. It doesn't seem like the issue was resolved to his satisfaction.

In the end, then, it seems that YSM still needs to iron out a few kinks: one, in security, and two, in portability, in order to win over and maintain more potential advertisers.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Let's say you're performing a campaign on Google AdWords and you have similar search terms -- for example, some with broad match and some with exact match for particular queries. Say, for example, that one of your searches is for [blue widgets] and the other is for blue widgets (broad match, no quotes). The question is -- which one does Google choose to trigger the ad?

A Google AdWords help document discusses this question in more depth. Depending on the criteria, different things may occur.

For example:

If there are multiple eligible keywords and one identical keyword, the common denominator keyword will trigger an ad.

On the other hand, if there are multiple eligible keywords in the same ad group (but no identical keyword), the keyword "that contains the most words" will trigger the ad.

Finally, if there are multiple eligible keywords across ad groups (but again, no identical keyword), the keyword with the highest combined Quality Score and CPC bid will trigger the ad.

Additional criteria for how Google chooses which keyword triggers which ad is included in the help document, and forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Some clients just need to know if their SEO investment is worthwhile. But how do you measure ROI, or rather, can you prove that there is a return on the investment?

It's a hard question to answer. On the superficial level, you can check Google Analytics and check if there has been an increase of visitors to your site, and if so, where they came from. But typically, there's really no way to prove ROI since there are so many different factors in play, including the increase in traffic, the attribution of that traffic to your actual SEO efforts, and the long-term investment of your SEO efforts.

Additional metrics include gathering prospective callers from the website (a practical solution to measure this would be to put a different phone number on the website versus on print publications) or by simply asking "How did you hear about us?" to people who dial in.

Forum discussion and (which includes a very nifty guide for metrics posted by nethy) continues on High Rankings Forum.