Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Most people still think of Web sites such as Google as places to go. Wrong. That's the old media model. In reality, every click is a command for some computer somewhere in the world. (...) Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google essentially is a huge, distributed supercomputer "doing all sorts of things over a fiber-optic network that eventually are services available to end-users." Before long, Googling will mean not just searching for something, but getting ALMOST anything done online.

Yahoo! recently finalized their consolidation of all their individual affiliate programs at Commission Junction to a single one.  The Yahoo! Search Marketing affiliate program was one of them. Although the old YSM program was closed at CJ are old affiliate links and banners still working, but without tracking commission (free traffic for  Yahoo!, way to go).  This flaw itself has nothing to do with Yahoo!, but is a questionable and known “feature” of Commission Junction.

I don’t want to rant (again) about this , but it exposed a flaw in the code of the YSM landing page, which is not only embarrassing but probably also causes the folks at the Yahoo! customer service department to start believing in the existence of parallel universes.

I can only imaging what must go through the head of a CS rep due to claims made by new YSM advertisers that swear by the life of their mother that Yahoo! promised but never provided them with the advertised amount of free clicks. Not advertised on another website or old magazine, but on the YSM sign-up page itself.

The problem is a flaw in the landing page code of  script located at searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php.

Affiliate Links redirect to that script with a number of URL parameters, such as the affiliate ID, a number of other parameters and two parameters which we will exam in more detail now.

The “o” parameter is used to pass on the Coupon Code that grants the discount to the customer to the sign-up script. The old Coupon Code that was good for $50 in credits was USCJ17 for example (o=USCJ17). It was replaced with the new coupon code USCJ16, which is good for only $25 in credits for clicks (o=USCJ16).

The other parameter is “b”, which contains the discount amount. b=50 would be a $50.00 discount for example.

The value for “o” is not validated by the script whatsoever and “b” can be any amount Yahoo! seems to offer as discount. It shows $0 on the page if the amount does not seem to be right. 100 (= $100 discount) does not work for example, but 75 ($75) seems to be a valid promotion amount, because it is accepted as value.

Check out this fake URL and see for yourself what Yahoo!’s own website is telling the visitor:

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/sponsoredsearch_v2.php?o=GO-GOOGLE-ADWORDS&b=75

Note: The URL is fake, no discount will be granted!

Here is a screen shot, because I don’t expect the link to work the way it does work today for much longer.

Advice to Yahoo!: Tell one of your developers to add a check for the coupon code (URL parameter “o”) and return an error, if it is an invalid or expired coupon (yes, show two different messages to avoid customer service issues and confusion).

While you verify the validity of the coupon code, pull also the actual discount amount that the customer gets with the coupon from the database and ignore the “b” parameter altogether.

I sent the affiliate management team of the Yahoo! affiliate program an email about this flaw and the issue with old, but seemingly working YSM promo banners and links already. I also told the AM about my blog post here at SEJ. Blogs tend to expedite response times by internet companies from time to time.  :)

Carsten Cumbrowski
Cumbrowski.com, Internet Marketing Resources Portal. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Offers and free click credits, SEM Resources and more.

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As they said they would when they expanded their alliance back in December 2005, AOL and Google are now offering advertisers the ability to buy search ads that will only be seen on AOL Search, using a white-label version of the AdWords platform.

The AOL Search Marketplace will allow marketers to target ads specifically to AOL Search users, and to coordinate search campaigns with other kinds of ads on the AOL Network. The move is an extension of the strategy AOL embarked on last summer, in which it began moving away from its roots as a dial-up service provider to become an ad-supported media network.

AOL's own research, as well as multiple third party reports, have noted a boost in performance when advertisers buy both search and display ads.

AOL will continue to share revenue from ads on its network with Google, though it's not clear whether the arrangement changed with this new implementation. This is the first time Google has offered a white-label version of the AdWords platform.

AOL has also made some changes to its shopping search and local search products. At shopping.aol.com, comparison shopping results previously supplied by Shopzilla have been replaced by results from new partner Pricegrabber. A new AOL Local Search beta has also been launched, sporting a combination of results from AOL-owned MapQuest, AOL CityGuide, and Yellow Pages business listings.

Woman calls BS on Vista-Capable computers. And she wants 5 million bucks. Whaaaa?

Are animals smarter than we thought? Any cat owner could have told you this.

Modern Drummer has new cross-platform digital archive.

Users slow to upgrade to Vista? Not surprising. Microsoft has
time on its side… most Windows users have to upgrade EVENTUALLY…. I’m planning for sometime next year.

Online Flash-based photo editor.. Wow. Not going to substitute for Photoshop (or Paint Shop Pro, or whatever) but it sure can do
a lot. Thanks Cool Tools.

Wiki-ing astronomy and space object information. [Doors]Show me the way to the next wikisky bar….[/Doors]

OpenBible.info. Biblical data geocoded, crunched in Excel, applied to Google Earth KML files, etc.

Google Image Ripper?.

Flickr Real Time. View Flickr pix or tags as they’re udpated. The FlickrTV is fascinatin’ — try the full-screen version.
My brain hurts, but in a good way.

Music artist cloud. Enter an artist, get a tag cloud of similar artists. Works okay, seems to go by era
a lot (enter Eurythmics and the cloud is like “Who’s Who of the 80s.”) Now if only there were some way to offload this into Pandora..

Adding Pop-up politician information to CNN pages.

Lookin’ for Seamonkey Slogans…

There’s no doubt that political videos have become a popular campaign media for political figures. MySpace has its own MySpace Impact which has become an avenue for U.S. presidentiables to strut out their campaign machineries. And now, YouTube with the influx of political videos in its portal launches its own political channel - Citizentube.

Citenzentube which is edited by  YouTube’s political  editor Steve Groove aims to aggregate the political videos already appearing in YouTube.  And with Citizentube, politicians and the voting public are free to be seen and heard. Politicians can showcase their propaganda and platform and  the voting public can create their own video criticizing or praising political figures.

Let’s see how popular this channel could get. Would YouTube users even bother to watch political videos? Would those videos impact the voting preferences of legal voters? But more importantly, would YouTube videos enough to win an election.

That we will have to see. In the meantime check out some available political videos at citizentube. There are quite a lot of interesting videos  already.

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It’s been a while since the Google Labs page has been updated with anything substantial. Well, today there’s a new service to be found there: Google Voice Local Search. This free and still experimental service allows you to call 1-800-GOOG-411 fom your US phone, and then state your location and say something like “Giovanni’s Pizzeria” to get connected to the business. Haochi in the forum describes what happens:

<<You call, they tell you they will record the call for quality, tell you that it’s “experimental” and then start asking you questions

1. City and State (me: Columbus, Ohio)
2. Query (me: apple store) – Google returns: Textcode
3. Query (me: movie) – Google returns: movie
4. Then they will read the top 8 results, you can say “1st result” or press 1 for the first result, and so on.
5. There you can get more detail about the business or send them a text message if you are on a cell.

I will give it a 6/10 for voice recognition.>>

Nate remarks, “I programmed this as a voice command for my cell phone. Works pretty slick. I can basically use this as a free 411. The voice prompts are pretty good and very intuitive.”

Odeo lets you listen to a recording of this.

[Thanks Garett, NateDawg, Haochi and Bilal!]

Join the ongoing comments.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

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Vanessa Fox tagged me asking 5 reasons why I blog.

1. So that I can write something once, and then I’ll have a place where I can point back to it. You try answering “I started/stopped buying AdWords and my rankings rose/dropped. Is Google boosting/penalizing me for buying ads?” for the 732nd time, and you’ll see the value in that. The answer is no, by the way.
2. I wanted to see what it was like to be a webmaster so I’d have a better idea of how to help webmasters.
3. So that I’d have a “guinea pig” site that the crawl/index/quality team could abuse, fold, mutilate, and spindle when they need to test something experimental, or to debug a problem.
4. I wanted to be able to tap the most awesome power on the internet — the lazyweb. When I don’t know something, the readers here normally do.
5. So everyone can enjoy getting to know my cats. You would not believe how many blog posts I do with Emmy sleeping on my chest. She’s napping on me right now as I write this. Here, I’ll take a picture with my cell phone:

   

   That was Emmy and me just a few minutes ago. She loves when I blog, because the tap-tap-tapping of the keys puts her to sleep. Then again, pretty much everything puts her to sleep (sunlight, food, petting, breathing, …)

I think someone should start a “Cats of SEO” blog post.

Did Google acquire g.cn? This super-short domain redirects to Google.cn now (and if your browser language hasn’t been set to Chinese, it will then redirect to Google.com). The China Search Engine View blog writes:

<<[W]hen you search the whois here, you may find there is one item more, “Registrant Organization: 北京刘元和君咨询有限公司” (Jan Liu & Associates), the attorney for Google’s case of googel.com.cn and googel.cn. Has Google really got g.cn?>>

In other news, the China Search Engine View blog reports that these days, Chinese users entering Google.com will be automatically redirected to the (censored) Google.cn version. This is consistent with behavior in other countries (like Germany, where you’re redirected from Google.com to Google.de the first time), and at the bottom of the Google.cn page I’m seeing the link “Google.com in English”.

[Thanks Cloudream!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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I have entered, awful thought! upon my 75th year.

• "Tintern Abbey"
• "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
• “The Prelude”

Szczególnie popularną wśród polskich webmasterów metodą optymalizacji stron pod kątem wyszukiwarek jest wymiana lub zakup linków o wysokim PageRank. W przeszłości niewątpliwie była to jedna z możliwości, która faktycznie przynosiła efekty. Niestety przy wyborze linków użytkownicy i ich zainteresowania nie zawsze są uwzględniane. Prowadzi to do linkowania serwisów i stron internetowych niezwiązanych ze sobą tematycznie. Tego typu linki nie stanowią żadnej wartości informacyjnej dla osób odwiedzających i są postrzegane jako nieetyczna metoda SEO, podobnie jak ukryty tekst. Wytyczne Google dla webmasterów jednoznacznie odnoszą się do takich praktyk.

Dbając o polskich użytkowników, Google niedawno ulepszył algorytmy i metody weryfikacji istotnych linków. Celem tych starań jest udostępnienie jak najlepszych wyników SERP (strony z wynikami wyszukiwania).

Jak więc należy poprawnie linkować strony internetowe, aby nie wykraczać poza wytyczne Google?
Starając się podwyższyć PageRank i dzięki temu osiągnąć lepsze notowanie strony w SERP, należy kierować się potrzebami potencjalnych użytkowników odwiedzających dany serwis, zarówno przy wyborze treści, jak i linków. Linkowanie do i linki z tematycznie związanych stron są doceniane przez Google i bez wątpienia będą pozytywnie wpływać na pozycje w indeksie. Równocześnie Google dąży do zlikwidowania wpływu masowej wymiany linków tematycznie rozbieżnych oraz linków zakupionych. Odnosi się to również do zautomatyzowanych systemów wymiany linków.

Jak więc postarać się o wartościowe linki?
Najlepszą metodą uzyskania dobrych linków jest niepowtarzalna, interesująca treść, która w naturalny sposób zdobędzie popularność w społeczności internetowej, a szczególnie wśród grona osób zainteresowanych danym tematem, na przykład u autorów blogów. Naturalnie uzyskane linki istnieją dłużej niż kupione, ponieważ nadane bezinteresownie rzadziej są usuwane. Niezależnie od rodzaju strony internetowej, czy tematu, należy kierować się wyłącznie potrzebami potencjalnych użytkowników. Każda decyzja odnosząca się do linkowania powinna być poprzedzona pytaniem: Czy będzie to użyteczne dla odwiedzających moją stronę?

One popular way to optimize webpages for search engines, especially among Polish Web masters, is with link exchanges or buying high PageRank links. Unfortunately, in the choice of link partners, some webmasters' priority has not always been on what is best for the user. This causes some people to link to totally unrelated pages or engage in link exchanges with spammy sites. This kind of linking does not provide additional value to the page’s visitors and is a SEO method that, like hiding text, can be considered spammy. Google’s webmaster guidelines refer clearly to methods of this type under "quality guidelines".