Search Engine Marketing Blog

In a recent article published by eMarketer (Online to Pass TV Ad Spend in UK), they have completed an excellent review of a forecast by Group M that predicts UK Internet Advertising will exceed that spent on Television advertising by 2009.

If this is true, it would make the UK the first country to see spend on online advertising overtake that spent on TV.

This is not the only forecast that has predicted the UK to be leading the pack when it comes to Internet advertising with the IAB publishing a similar forecast in October 2006.

Overall, Group M forecasts 2008 online advertising spend to be £3.4 billion with 65% coming from search.

Google are currently rolling out the new AdWords Local PlusBox which will now enable the top featured sponsored result in the Google search engine to display even more information.

This information will consist of a map, contact details, address and will even allow people to get directions. The best part is there is no extra charge for this and you will only billed by Google as normal, when someone clicks on your add and arrives at your landing page.

For local businesses looking specifically to target their particular geographical location this could prove very helpful in maximising the online visibility received.

More information can be found here at the Inside AdWords Blog

After July’s announcement Ask.com has now gone live with AskEraser their new free privacy tool which can be enabled by its users and remain active for 24 months before it will need to be activated again.

This will mean that users can ultimately surf anonymously within the ASK.com search engine. This means that Ask will stop recording the searchers search queries and cookie information (Ip address, user Id, session Id and the complete query text).

If you do use the personalisation features on Ask using AskEraser will get rid of these along with other cookies stored on your computer.

It is unsure if this move will encourage many more users to use the Ask.com search engine over competitors such as Google, Yahoo and MSN but it is a good move and shows that they are making moves to further protect users privacy.

Google is now taking minutes to index web pages instead of days according to a recent article by Manoi Jasra for Search Engine Guide. This is probably Google’s response to the fast paced blogging trends that mean content on the internet is now being updated at a much faster rate.

This goes to show that your content can be indexed and appearing in Google’s search results faster than ever which is great news for web site owners with fast moving content that want to get their news to the internet as fast as possible.

Last Thursday Google rolled out their new charts API which will allow anyone and everyone to to embed stunning dynamic charts into their web pages.

These charts were originally created for Google’s use but they have now made the technology freely available to everyone. The charts will be rendered as PNG format and are available in several different formats including:

- Line Graphs
- Pie Charts
- Bar Charts
- Scatter Plots
- Venn Diagraphs

So if you are into charts and graphs then this is an API for you!

At the recent Pubcon Matt Cutts has announced that Google will begin to start treating subdomains like a normal folders.

In a few weeks Google will roll out a new filter that will look to allow a maximum of 2 results per domain to be returned in any given search. There will of course be exceptions to this rule for sites such as blogspot.com but it should look to halt the results ownership some big sites have held and open the doors to a more relevant results list.

Everyone knows that Google is making money like there’s no tomorrow but could the search giant be losing $110 million a year by having the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button next to the “Google Search” button?

That’s the claim in featured in a post on the Valleywag site.

Of course, Google aren’t saying how much this feature is really costing them but what is clear is that every time a search “feels lucky” they bypass the search results page and therefore miss the company’s sponsored adverts. It is estimated that as many as 1% of searches could be made this way ‘though that number is disputed in the many comments below the post.

Whatever it’s costing Google, the company will hardly be worried as profits continue to soar, just like the company’s many privately owned airplanes!