03.08.06
Posted in Search Engine Woes at 7:42 pm by blog
I suppose I was being clever or naive - one of the two. One of my AdWords campaigns was doing quite well already when I decided to add another ad group to it. Now, what’s wrong with that you may ask?
Thing is, I wanted the new ad group to direct visitors to the same web page as the old one - and to run them both concurrently. I experimented with new text for the ad and set the url to the same one as my other ad. It worked a treat, with both ads working up to a healthy CTR until.. it all went dead, not a single impression let alone a click!
It took a few days of complete inactivity and an email to the nice people of AddWords Support to find out what happened…
I had fallen foul of Google’s cutely-named Double-Serving Policy which I had obviously missed during my various intellectual battles with the guidelines!
I have now deleted the offending group and everything is good as pie 
For a quick refresher on the Google AdWords guidelines, click here
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02.25.06
Posted in Search Engine Woes at 7:23 pm by blog
There is no denying it that Google is the king of Search Engines, although much has changed since its humble beginnings in 1998. Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s vision of a Search Engine that ranks a site in terms of its popularity with link partners proved an overnight success. This ‘concensus’-based value judgement was as democratic as it was revolutionary.
Has anything changed since then? Has this vision and Google’s original mission gone by the wayside? Was the appointment of a former Novell CEO a turning point for a company that was run until then by two brilliant, and perhaps idealistic, young men barely in their thirties?
‘Don’t be Evil’ is the greatest motto for a company that made it big on the strength of its ideas and technologies. Is this code of conduct still adhered to? Is it perhaps interpreted differently now, with a ‘we know best’ claim to infallability?
A lot has been said and written about Google’s ‘blacklists’, the dark dungeons of non-existence for any web site that, at some point or other, broke the rules of engagement -as interpreted by the post-processing algorithms that follow GoogleBot’s benign visits!
If a website is found to have broken any of the ‘rules’ (as expressed in the Webmasters Guidelines), all traces of it can disappear from Google’s index, never to be found again. It seems that once banished, there is no amount of corrective action on the webmaster’s part to restore peace with Google. What’s worse, the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ credo does not stretch to an automatic email being fired off to the offending site pointing out the reasons and the steps required for a return to righteousness!
I remember reading somewhere that Yahoo and MSN have overtaken Google on the sheer number of searches carried out each day. Now, that’s worrying!
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