Organic SEO Blog

Google recently admitted that hackers successfully hijacked AdWords, which allowed cyber criminals to use affected links to redirect users to web sites that contained malicious software. Google immediately shut down the offending links once they were discovered early last week.

At least 20 specific search terms that appeared on Google as legitimate ads, redirected users to smartattack.org, which distributed the malicious code. The flaw appears to only have affected users of the Microsoft Windows XP operating systems. The web exploit was discovered by Exploit Prevention Labs, a security firm. They said they found the threat earlier this month when searching the phrase “how to start a business.” One of the hyperlinks related to the search term led to a site that attempted to install a keylogger.

Google is now looking at its AdWords practices to prevent similar incidents in the future…

Yahoo! Music and digital media entertainment firm Gracenote are to launch a service allowing Yahoo! customers free access to a lyrics database, making it the first mass-market web service to host such a service. Yahoo! customers can now search with partial lyrics on the Yahoo! Music search bar.

Just select “Lyrics” from the music search box and enter a part of the song you remember, say, “don’t know much about a science book.” Yahoo will then show you the artist (if found – their database contains hundreds of thousands of songs from the provider Gracenote, and misses some hits) and the relevant snippet. Click on it and you’ll then see the album cover, you can play a sample from the song, buy the music, and read the full lyrics.

Yesterday, Google re-branded its shopping search engine, Froogle, as ‘Google Product Search‘ and seems to have worked on the user interface of its new service to make it more user-friendly.

The Froogle renaming news came in shortly after Google announced its expansion of its Paypal competitor, Google Checkout. The new Products search results page now has a link at the top of each page to limit search results to retailers who offer Google Checkout payment services.

Google will also continue to provide the top Google Product Search listings ahead of the first organic result within their OneBox search results. This is a potential opportunity for some of the listings to get ahead of the first organic result on google web search.

Online Marketing constitutes over $2 trillion in annual sales of th U.S economy, and two-thirds of American households now contain a computer with Internet access. Businesses try to get a competitive edge with their Web sites and some of the Online Marketing tactics run afoul of traditional notions of trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Google Adwrods apparently allows competitors to bid on trademarked terms, including competitors business names.

AdWords Trademark Complaint Procedure

When we receive a complaint from a trademark owner, we only investigate the use of the trademark in ad text. If the advertiser is using the trademark in ad text, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademark and prevent them from using it in ad text in the future. Please note that we will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint. In addition, please note that any such investigation will only affect ads served on or by Google.

Search engines organic results are based on how search engine robots read metatags written into the Web site code, which further describe the nature of the site. Some site operators include the trademarked words of competitors in the metatags. For instance, a Hewlett-Packard personal computer retailer might create metatext so that a person typing into a search engine the term “Apple Computer” might end up finding the Hewlett-Packard personal computer retailer.

This phenomenon, defined as “initial interest confusion,” can cause an inquiring buyer mistakenly to visit a Web site which sells something he needs, but is of a different brand; and Trademarks and Brand names as of now aren’t protected on the Internet.

Pay-Per-Action (beta): Pay only for actions that you define.

Google is now beta testing a different business formula for AdSense that eases up on its lucrative pay-per-click model in favor of a pay-per-action model. This Pay-Per-Action program could help address the problems faced by the advertisers due to click fraud.

The main benefit of this pay-per-action model for advertisers is that publishers can no longer make money by clicking on or paying others to click on advertisements on their own site.

You’ll create an ad and define the action that you want a user to perform when they visit your site, such as signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product. Then you’ll set the amount that you’re willing to pay when this action is completed. Finally, you’ll install conversion tracking code on your website so that we can verify when an action has been completed.

But don’t be surprised if Google’s new product helps advertisers to address this click fraud issue, Yahoo is also making a similar move to let advertisers know that it hears their concerns

Google’s Sunday press release and accompanying Web site www.google.com/tisp/ announced the Beta version of Google’s Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP), a “free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users’ plumbing systems.”
TiSP has all the buzzwords that any self-respecting, early 21st Century Net project could want: self-installed, ad-supported, available for any Wi-Fi-capable PC, and requiring XP or Vista (with Mac and Linux support coming soon). And it added a new one, the codename for TiSP: “dark porcelain.”

Nice! Keep on rocking, Google.