Searchcorp

An advertiser using MSN adCenter has a product listed for $69.99. However, he can’t actually feature the price in the ad because the number “69″ is not allowed. I tried to update an ad this morning with the price of…

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is such an exiting field, in my opinion, because it constantly changes. What works today may not work in six months or even three weeks. Practitioners of full time SEO can attest to the fact…

Google AdWords and other paid search marketing (PPC or pay-per-click) platforms including Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter provide very robust administration platforms to allow for a variety of options to be specified when serving ads to searchers and contextual…

Microsoft has added a search engine marketing offering to the suite of services available to its Microsoft Office Live Small Business subscribers. Through a partnership with The Search Agency, a Santa Monica-based SEM firm, Microsoft’s customers, typically very small businesses with less than 10 employees, can sign up for three levels of service ranging from online training to full service campaign management.

“The needs of entrepreneurs in this space are very diverse. Some are do-it-yourself oriented, and want to learn to do everything, while others want to completely offload certain aspects of their business to vendors,” said Louise Rasho, senior manager of marketing communications for Microsoft Office Live Small Business. “Then there are the folks in the middle, who need consultative help getting started, so they can take over from there.”

Microsoft already offers a service for the DIY set: the adManager service that allows subscribers to buy and manage PPC ads from Microsoft Windows Live Search and Ask Sponsored Listings. For the hands-off approach, Microsoft has an existing arrangement with Website Pros to handle full-service Web development and search needs.

The new services from The Search Agency will fit the needs of those users at either end, as well as those who fall somewhere in the middle, Rasho said.

The first service, TSA Learn, consists of three online training modules that teach the essentials of SEM and search engine optimization (SEO). Next is TSA Launch, a selection of more than 20 one-off, a la carte SEM and SEO services. For example, a user can fill out a questionnaire about their business and get a list of potential keywords to use in their search campaign, or enter their existing keywords and get a list of expanded keywords to consider. The third offering is TSA Grow, which is a full-service option where The Search Agency manages all search marketing activities for the subscriber.

What’s a Link Worth? Priceless? In today’s Link Love column, “Link Value: Top Rankings, Secrets and Lies - Part 1,” Justilien Gaspard encourages you to consider some simple techniques and strategies to help determine the value of a link.

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

Click to read the rest of this post…

Google removed ads from its Orkut social networking service in August after facing complaints filed with a Brazilian advertising body, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Brazilian nonprofit group SaferNet lodged a complaint alleging that Orkut contains child pornography and other illegal content on some users’ pages. Google removes such content when it’s found

According to Google, the ads were part of a test, and only appeared on only 1% of Orkut pages. A Google executive in Brazil, Alexandre Hohagen, told the WSJ that the company was working closely with Brazilian authorities, and future plans for ads on Orkut were unclear.

Lack of control over the content ads appear near has been an issue for advertisers, especially big-brand owners. Add to that the reported poor performanceof ads, along with the risk of offending the core audience by disrupting their user experience, and it makes one wonder how sites like Facebook will ever be “the next Google,” or why folks like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer think the hype around social networks is going to die down.

I received another email with the updated press release about new changes to Panama so figured I would pass it along for everyone to read:

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet brand, today announced the introduction of Blocked Domains within its Sponsored Search system, known as Panama. The new feature provides site blocking capabilities for advertisers enabling them to have greater control over where their sponsored search and contextual ads appear. Since these ads can appear outside the Yahoo! network, the Blocked Domains feature will allow advertisers to specify websites and/or sections of websites on which they don’t want their ads to appear. This feature is designed to better enable advertisers to block their ads from appearing on websites that don’t meet their business needs. This is just one of several ways Yahoo! is working to improve the value of traffic that is delivered to advertisers.

“This domain-blocking feature is yet another way for us to provide greater advertiser control,” said Reggie Davis, Vice President of Marketplace Quality, for Yahoo!, “Now, by enabling advertisers to control the placement of their ads, they can partner with us to help drive traffic quality. We believe this is welcomed news for advertisers.”

This year, Yahoo! introduced pricing discounts so that advertisers may be charged less based on Yahoo!’s assessment of the quality of its partners’ traffic, as well as Yahoo!’s Click Protection System which automatically filters out potentially invalid and poorly performing clicks .Yahoo! has also launched enhanced geo-targeting, blocked continents, and most recently the Traffic Quality Center (trafficquality.yahoo.com).

With the new Blocked Domains, advertisers will be able to block up to 250 domains per account, including an entire domain, a subdomain, and up to two directories within a particular domain. Yahoo! plans to introduce the Blocked Domains feature in October 2007.

A forum discussion on this topic can be found here.

Links from .edu domains are commonly thought to be higher quality links than links from other top level domains. There is truth to the notion, but not because the domain has the magic letters (.edu) in the domain. The reason why these types of domains tend to offer better quality links is that they often receive better quality links, and in significant volume.

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped provides an example of this with his recent post .Edu and Spam, where he provides the example of America.edu, a site filled with Google Ads. In spite of 941 third party back links (according to Yahoo), the site has a Page Rank of 0.

A quick look at the site reveals the problem. In addition to the Google ads, the rest of the content is in the form of news feeds. The site is not going to draw a whole slew of high quality links. They actually do have a couple of decent links in the batch, which appear to have been obtained by writing and syndicating articles.

Ultimately, there is no magic fairy dust here, or with .edu domains in general. However, there are a couple of reasons why looking to colleges and universities is still a really good idea:

1. Real colleges and universities do get a lot of trusted links, and therefore and provide a more trusted link
2. These schools also do like to point their students to helpful resources

These factors make this a useful direction for link building efforts. However, be sure that you do have something very, very useful. These types of entities tend to shine a harsh white light on all such requests to make sure that they truly have merit, and are useful for their students.

In July, Google acquired Postini, and today, it is going to put that acquisition to good use by allowing corporate subscribers to take advantage of the new services “by adding new security tools and more than doubling the storage capacity…