google

Google has launched their version of a "website overnight" - Google sites. Those who keep up with Google expected this to come soon.

I'm excited to know that my blogging website now has a page rank of four. It only took about 1.5 years!!! With the page rank of four, I guess I can now start blogging for major blogging companies!

I really enjoy blogging. I've been writing for/journaling/blogging for somewhere around 14 years now. Writing has fundamentally changed my life, al
low me to express myself privately and publicly. When you start writing to the online world you begin to think a little bit more about what you want to say and how you want to say it. Not to mention if your English is correct. Nobody wants to look like a dummy :(

I have finally found a reason to like Google. First, let me say that those who know me (or read my google related blog posts) know that I really don't like google's policies and "interests". I won't go into that now, but just so you know why I posted this, I really don't like Google.

That said, I have found a product of theirs that I really think is cool and useful. Google docs. I have been using it to collaborate "todo" lists with some colleagues. It has turned out to be a really handy tool that, (ouch ouch) I would recommend for others to use.

I know in college I worked in groups often for projects. This is a great tool for that type of environment.

Well, it seems Google got things right this time around. On November 6th the algo went in favor for cameraprices.com. Finally some justice. It just goes to show that even big and well respected companies do things wrong.

I have no proof of this but I have a gut feeling that the algo change done in July was to kill two birds with one stone. One, to truly work on "better user experience" and, two pocket some extra dough to make up for their lawsuit.

The other day while looking at my stats from Google analytics I noticed that some traffic from the UK side of cameraprices.com was receiving Adwords traffic. After checking around it seems that Google had changed something as the UK ads were driving some traffic. I did check the Adwords blog and sure enough they did change the algo. Some of my ads that were expensive are now cheaper. Not as cheap as they were but there is progress. I will do more research within the following days and post the results.

I am surprised they made the change this quickly as my prediction early January the algo would be changed to include some of the excluded users. I am thinking now that Google will still have a January update too but mostly focusing on the content search side more...

More coming soon.

I didn't write much on this topic yesterday so I wanted to come back to make a few points. Please see original version of this post then read this one.

First, let's go over who Brian R is. As I stated in a previous post (http://www.elvismcneely.com/blog/google-awords-update) Brian R is a 2nd tier supervisor in the Google Adwords department. About six weeks back Jen, an Adwords Rep, and I talked about my CameraPrices.com site and asked why it was being docked for bad landing page quality. That conversation led to a site review request.

Today I received a phone call from Brian, a supervisor from Google Adwords, and we talked (for 48 minutes) in depth of the landing page quality issue with Camera Prices and how I felt about these issues. Brian is a second tier supervisor I guess. Guyer, who I spoke with first, is the supervisor of Adwords reps. Brian is Guyer's supervisor, if I understood correctly. Brian was very patient with me as I explained my point of view and how another specific site should be docked for lower quality as well.

There were no guarantees that my issues would be solved but he is willing to work with me over some matters. Although a site review was done it was not approved so the keyword minimum cpc is still very high.

Here is the letter I wrote to Google Adwords team September 17th, 2006. I mentioned a few days ago I would post this. It is lengthy (4 pages in Word), so grab a cup of tea and enjoy reading it. All the example domains/site names have been removed for privacy reasons. I would love some feedback on this post and to know if you are a victim to a google lie too.

===========================================

I found recently a concern with another Adword user. On the search term Camera Prices
[removed url for privacy]

Well, as I wrote yesterday, I mentioned that I would be writing on a company who I have lost trust in. As you can see from this title it is rather a large company. Why have I lost trust in Google? In a nutshell, Google lied. Google lied to me personally, and after much research, has lied to many many people and chances are too everyone who uses Google's search engine.