By: Andy Beal | Source: businessweek.com

A lengthy revamp of the company’s methods for ranking online ads was time well spent—and may help narrow Google’s lead.

If you’ve watched any professional motor sport, you’ve likely witnessed the following scenario. The early leader loses ground to other racers as his car’s tires begin wearing out or the engine starts smoking. A pit stop will initially cause the driver to fall even further behind. But ultimately the time taken under the care of mechanics helps the driver pull back into the lead. If the Web’s search engine industry is the race track, Yahoo has just taken a timely pit stop to try and win back ground lost against the new leader, Google.

On Feb. 5, Yahoo! started moving all of its paid search advertisers over to a new ranking model, informally known as "Panama." The aim: Gain some much-needed momentum on Google’s more widely used AdWords platform.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: Judy | Source: adwords.blogspot.com

AdWords Editor 3.0 is now available for Windows. With Version 3.0, you can:

• Add or edit site-targeted campaigns
• Add or edit negative sites for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns
• Edit another account while posting or checking your changes
• Pause or resume individual ads, keywords, and sites
• See the number of rows you’ve selected in the data view

If you’re already using AdWords Editor, your version will be updated automatically the next time you start the application. You can also get AdWords Editor directly from the download page. For more details, please check out the release notes section of the AdWords Editor website.

Please note that Version 3.0 is currently available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista only. If you’re a Mac user, we won’t keep you waiting long — AdWords Editor 3.0 for Mac is scheduled for release in a few weeks.

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit

By: Phil Harton | Source: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

In the fight against badware, protecting Google users by showing warnings before they visit dangerous sites is only a small piece of the puzzle. It’s even more important to help webmasters protect their own users, and we’ve been working on this with StopBadware.org. A few months ago we took the first step and integrated malware notifications into webmaster tools. I’m pleased to announce that we are now including more detailed information in these notifications, and are also sending them to webmasters via email.

Webmaster tools notifications
Now instead of simply informing webmasters that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we’re also showing example URLs that we’ve determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.

Read the rest of this entry »