I’m very excited about this acquisition, however, I’ll just link to the most appropriate news for right now:

• RHD Press Release
  
• Greg Sterling’s writeup

Microsoft’s adExcellence program is similiar to the Yahoo Ambassador or the Google AdWords Professional program.

The program is still in beta, however, to quality for the program one must pass a test and have a minimum amount of spend (which is pretty low) in an account to quality for the program.

The original test wasn’t extremely difficult, and I’ve already talked to Microsoft about some of the questions and changing them up a bit. Many of the items were around PPC best practices; which is good to see as I don’t think everything on the test should be centered around just one product; but around how a good PPC campaign is setup and managed.

One item Microsoft is set on doing (and the other engines need to follow suit) is creating a directory of it’s members.

These certifications don’t mean much (nor does any certification) without awareness. While I applaud the engines for creating programs that lets consumers know if one is qualified, the consumer awareness about these programs is exceptionally low. Hence, consumers don’t actually seek out these professionals to run their campaigns.

Engines should showcase these programs to raise awareness. Once their is awareness, then there is also an additional benefit for one to learn any of the PPC programs to the satisfaction of the engine to earn one’s qualification.

The second items the engines need to follow up with is support for the individuals who pass these programs. People who take (and pass) these programs are the most likely candidates for being product evangelists.

At present, there is no special contact phone number, email address, or skywriting for one who has any of the search engine qualifications. If one happens to be on another team, then one can get support through the normal channels. However, if one does not have an account rep, then one still has to go through the normal channels for support. These programs and qualifiers should be embraced by the engines.

Yahoo is currently in the process of restructuring their ambassador program; and Microsoft is still in beta, so maybe there is hope that some of these support channels will begin to emerge.

After much prodding, invites, and complaints that I wasn’t on Facebook - I finally joined.

The main reason I joined? It wasn’t to stop the invites (those are easy to delete) - it was to see if it helps catch up with people as I travel.

I’ve already spent time this year in:

• NYC (4x)
• Washington DC (3x)
• Upstate NY (2x)
• Seattle (3x)
• Charlotte
• San Jose (2x)
• San Francisco
• Detrioit
• Minneapolis
• Toronto
• Las Vegas
• Phoenix
• St. Louis
• Little Rock
• New Orleans
• Miami
• Denver (2x)
• Dallas
• Boston

That I can remember. With that much traveling, it’s always good to try and have dinner, drinks, coffee, and just catch up/meet people as I travel.

Now, will social networking actually work for this purpose? I guess I’ll find out.

If you haven’t joined, or don’t know the rules, Rae has an excellent post on the Unofficial Guide to Using Facebook.

My latest article on Search Engine Land is now out that goes into depth about contextual optimization:

The major pay per click engines, such as Google and Yahoo, include two different types of distribution: On their own search engine result pages, and on content pages elsewhere on the web. These two types of advertising, while often lumped together under the pay-per-click (PPC) label, are very different. Advertiser’s ability to control these networks and consumer’s interaction with these networks are completely different. Hence, they should be treated as completely separate types of distribution.

Often contextual advertising gets a (sometimes undeserved) bad rap. There are techniques that you can use to have a very effective contextual ad campaign.

Enjoy the entire article on SEL.

There are a few people in the industry who I’ve not really had a chance to talk to, and amazingly, Matt is one of them. We’ve been at the same conferences several times, yet never quite hooked up for some good conversation.

Matt has a fantastic article on the upgrades to the LBC. And since he beat me to writing about it, I’ll just let you follow the link to LBC Upgrade.

He’s also a Search Engine Land columnist (like myself) and wrote a nice piece today about the Top 20 Don’ts in SEO.

The YSM blog has been putting out warnings for some time that Yahoo would go to all short descriptions.

It seems today is that day.

Starting today, ads that appear in U.S. Yahoo! Search results with descriptions longer than 70 characters will be cut off (”truncated”) at the nearest complete word, followed by an ellipsis. The optional 190-character long descriptions may still be displayed on some of our distribution partners’ sites.

If you haven’t gone through your Yahoo Panama account and created short descriptions, you definitely should. Yahoo will automatically truncate your ads, and when the ads are truncated, you are losing control of your marketing message.

As an advertiser, one of your top priorities should be controlling your message.

More information from Yahoo on how to change your ads.

Some info about ad description writing.

Google didn’t keep the wraps on their affiliate like Pay Per Action ads for long. Introduced in March, these ads have already come out of beta.

Google announced today the worldwide expansion of its pay-per-action advertising beta. Pay-per-action is a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when a pre-defined action is completed on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action. Since the initial launch of the pay-per-action advertising beta in March 2007, many advertisers who have used the new pricing model are pleased with the opportunity to have more ways to promote their products and services online.

Source: Google Press Release

Additional Resources:

• For Advertisers: Guide to creating pay per action ads
• For Publishers: Guide to creating pay per action ads (Search Engine Land Article)

• Have you ever wanted to block a competitor from being able to see your ad?
• Have you ever seen an IP address in your log files that seems to click your ad over and over?
• Have you ever said ‘I just don’t want people from these IPs to see my ads’?

The wait is over, now advertisers can block specific IPs from viewing their ads.

IP Exclusion

This feature enables you to specify IP addresses where you don’t want your ads to appear.

You can exclude up to 20 IP addresses, or ranges of addresses, per campaign. All ads in the campaign are prevented from showing for users with the IP addresses you specify, so we recommend you choose your list carefully.

An important note about IP address exclusion: Some large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a range of IP addresses for all their users. If you exclude an IP address that is a proxy for many users, you could be blocking a large amount of legitimate, and potentially profitable traffic. Google takes no responsibility for this action.

Source, AdWords Help Files.

How to Block IPs

To exclude IP addresses, follow the steps below:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click Tools at the top of your Campaign Summary page.
3. Click IP Exclusion under ‘Optimize Your Ads.’
4. Select a campaign, and click Go.
5. Enter the list of IP addresses to be excluded.
6. Click Exclude IP Addresses.

Once you’ve excluded IP addresses for a campaign, you can view or edit your list by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Click the campaign you wish to edit.
3. The number of existing excluded IP addresses will appear beneath the campaign name and daily budget.
4. Click View/edit.

Source, AdWords Help Files.

Wildcards are available

In addition, you can block ranges of IPs using wildcards. The wildcard can only be used for the last 3 digits of the IP address.

• 123.4.5.67
• 123.4.5.*
• 123.45.167.1

Request for Google

The next step in helping advertisers verify their IP blocking would be to add the ability to see ads by IP address in the Ad Preview tool.

A note of caution:

Some hosts don’t assign unique IPs per user. If you block an IP address for a host which gives all of their users the same IP address, you will block that entire user range.

This is an especially important note if you see a lot of visits from Reston, VA and try to block those ranges of IP addresses. It is possible to block all AOL dial up users from seeing your ads.

The tool is very useful for blocking specific IPs, competitors, etc from seeing your ad. However, as with any filtering tool, make sure that you see an account improvements in items like conversion rate and cost per conversion so that the blocking is having the desired effect on your account.

Yahoo recently rolled out Quality Based Pricing.

Essentially, this says that not all clicks from the content network are created equal, and therefore, they advertisers should pay a different price based upon the quality of that click.

What’s interesting is Yahoo is saying they are using conversion data as one of the data points (there are others) in determining this pricing.

For those familiar with AdWords, it’s very similar to the AdWords Discounter.

• Yahoo blog announcement
• YSM FAQs on QBP

The first SEO Class was very successful. The feedback was excellent, and we’re happy with how the day went. We’ve officially partnered with Webmaster World for the next show which is coming back to New York on July 30th-31st.

The speakers are:

• Michael Grey
• Todd Mailcoat
• Greg Niland
• and myself

Feel free to visit the SEO Class website, view the agenda, or better yet, register.

There’s also a discussion on Webmaster World about the next class.

Hope to see you there.