Earlier this month, Tony commented briefly on a news tidbit that there is a class action suit against Google for overcharging the daily budgets. (Original article here.)

Now, I know this is a shock – but I’m gonna come to Google’s defense on this one.

Yes, at first, for a few minutes, I found it a little confusing. But it took about five minutes to understand that the daily budget is an average. That during the course of a month, there will be some days a little over and some a little under. That if there is significant overspending, Google will refund the charges – which means the client has gotten free clicks, since it’s not like they can take back the traffic.

The suit alleges that there are instances when campaigns have spent as much as 160% of the daily budget and not gotten a refund. I’d venture to guess that these same people had days that ran underbudget – and they are expecting a refund for each day they go over, when that’s just not how it works.

Google does a much better job of keeping the daily spend close to the daily budget than Yahoo. You can set an average daily budget on Yahoo and still get days when it spends 3x that amount, and as a result shuts the campaign off completely on other days. Though really, that just seems like poor management to me. It would be in the search engine’s interest to keep those ads running a bit every day, at the very least because this would make the clients happier and more secure.

I’d guess that there may be technical limitations to how accurately the engines can keep a campaign under a specific budget… how fast is the data processed, the costs updated, and then the campaign shut off? In the time it takes for that to happen, how many more clicks will be incurred?

It’s not like Google make a secret of how the budget works. If I advertise with a newspaper and don’t understand their written policies – can I sue them? Seriously – do people get to win a lawsuit just because they’re dumb? Oh, wait… (remembers McDonald’s hot coffee warning) sometimes they do.

Ask Jeeves or should I say Ask is 86'ing the Butler icon.

IMO...I don't see the value in doing away with an icon that is synonymous with this engine from it's inception. I like Jeeves (fat or thin Jeeves...no preference here). Could it be that Ask "bit" on a rebranding pitch from the agencies - TBWA/Chiat/Day or Hanft Unlimited????

Here is an idea...take the money that you have budgeted to spend on your new branding initiative and put that money into improving your search technology!

Just stumbled across this a minute ago...

All I want to know is, how long until you're able to choose your own background color?

Your thoughts??

Interesting article in ClickZ News - -> http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3528611

It appears that Google is doing some heavy testing on mixing commercial results in with organic results in the SERPs. From what Google is saying...,"the results are not paid listings, saying the demarcated results are a search relevancy experiment."

OK...to see what we are talking about...

Perform a search on "on demand" (without the quotes) in Google and you will see that positions #6 - #8 are segmented out and show pages from Comcast.com (Google deems these as "commercial results"). However, Comcast.com also appears in the organic listings in the #30 postion...oops...the #31 position...oops...the #29 position. Ah...the ever-flux...Jeff and I are comparing our results from two different machines and it seems to vary (I am sure that we are querying different data centers)

This is totally boggling our minds! How does Google determine that Comcast.net should be served up in the "commercial" results and not network websites like Starz!, Cinemax, TMC, etc.? Jeff and I believe that it must be based on Comcast.net's impressions to click-through rates for that keyword phrase. That is IF Google is trying to serve those results based on relevancy.

We know that these listings aren't paid...unless Google is breaking the US FTC's guidelines on disclosure of paid content in SERPs

We agree with Levin and Lee...this could have a major impact on the way we optimize websites.

Eager to see how this unfolds!

Search engine market shares in July 2005: Google - 59.2%, Yahoo! - 28.8%, MSN - 5.5% by ZDNet's ZDNet Research -- HitWise says Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search accounted for 93.5% of US searches in July 2005. Google garnered 59.2% of searches. Yahoo! Search and MSN Search captured 28.8% and 5.5% shares, respectively.

Google Software Engineer, Matt Cutts, has launched his own blog. He is sharing valuable information, suggestions, and insight on Google indexing and SEO in general.

Pretty good stuff!

That's right...Danny is wielding his power to promote Search Marketing Day. I don't care who you are, please go and vote for this holiday. Myself and zunchers like me work countless hours, 364 days a year to promote other people's websites (we do get Columbus day off). We slave over keyword research, competitve analysis and website analytics day in and day out for mere pennies on the dollar, while the lion's share of the profit goes to support John's Starbucks addiction. Please...from the bottom of my heart I'm pleading for you to help make this dream become reality. We need a day for ourselves!

Just a little fun on this slow Thursday. Back to the foosball table...

New music search utility provided by Yahoo! Search - Yahoo! Audio Search

Not really SEO/SEM related but a pretty cool way to search your favorite music, interviews, podcasts, speeches, etc.

I guess if you are looking for a podcasts on SEO/SEM this could be a good place to start!

There's a very interesting thread over at SEW that discusses how search engine's should handle redirects. As anyone in the industry knows, the search engines have been giving SEM professionals headaches for years now on this issue. The main problem is that Google behaves differently than Yahoo, and MSN differently then Ask...you get the picture. No standards.

Fact is, URLs change. Just this week one of my accounts (large e-commerce site) converted to a completely new backend system, totally changing every URL on the site. We're doing our best to use 301 redirects in order to match the old URLs with the corresponding new URLs, but there will be a fallout. To them, the benefits of the bew backend were worth the loss of traffic for a time.

Tony and I are already preparing for another battle (read: headache) later this year when a client (a nationwide bank) will change domains. We've delivered to them a risk assesment regarding the potential negative impact to their SEM program, as well as recommendations for making the transition as smooth as possible. Do we blame them for wanting to change domains? Absolutely not. By all accounts, in the long run they will be much better off for changing. We just wish it weren't so difficult for the search engines to recognize and adjust accordingly.

Hopefully Danny and his crew will spark major progress in this regard. I'd love to be able to throw away the bottle of Aspirin that sits on my desk labelled "redirection painkiller".