Marketing Pilgrim

It’s Google day on Marketing Pilgrim. Google is testing a way for people to customize their search results. Marketers shudder (but you know it was coming). Google keeps moving towards rewarding quality and delisting thin sites. As they get more sophisticated it gets tougher to game Google. If they can give people power to influence their own search results, it could have a quite an influence on the SEM industry.

If you have quality content it will only help you as your sites rise to the top. Along this theme, today Google said they have recently purged the search engine of thousands of malware sites.

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It looks like Google might be getting serious about its payment product, Google Checkout. First, right around Thanksgiving, they replaced the ‘Videos’ link with ‘Products’. Earlier this week, Google announced Google Checkout promotions for the holiday season.

Now today, Google Blogoscoped reports that the SERPs in that same Product Search (nice name, eh?) are littered with Google Checkout Badges. As Philipp’s subtitle reads, “No PayPal Badges In Sight.”

And also today, Internet Retailer reports that Google Checkout is pulling ahead of PayPal Express Checkout in terms of adoption by major etailers. Of the top 200 largest online merchants, twenty-six accept payment through Google Checkout, compared to twenty-one who take PayPal EC. (via)

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As anticipated yesterday, Facebook has announced their modifications to Project Beacon. As Search Engine Land reports, the changes include opt-in instead of opt-out for listing purchases through Project Beacon partner sites. I think we can also safely assume that the opt-in notices will be more noticeable than were the previous messages.

Among the other changes:

If a user does nothing with the initial notification on Facebook, it will hide after some duration without a story being published. When a user takes a future action on a Beacon site, it will reappear and display all the potential stories along with the opportunity to click “OK” to publish or click “remove” to not publish.

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If you’re heading to PubCon and are either:

a) One of the thousand plus Gooruze that are already enjoying the net’s newest online community for marketers; or
b) Want to know what the heck the above means

Come and join me and other Gooruze for an informal social gathering. Here’s what you need to know:

When: Thursday December 6th, 5:30-7:00pm
Where: Envy Lounge at the Renaissance Hotel (next door to the convention center)
Who: Gooruze members AND those interested in learning more (basically "open to all")
Why: Because Gooruze is picking up the bar tab!

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While the WSJ is speculating, Marketing Pilgrim is all about confirming, and we can confirm that Google will indeed bid on the new 700MHz wireless band.

According to Google, its formal application to participate in the 700 MHz auction will be filed with the FCC on Monday, December 3, 2007 — the required first step in the auction process.

“We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google in a statement. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.”

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The interns are taking over the Googleplex! Seriously, if you want to know why Google is so intent on reaching geniuses at an early age, you need look no further than today’s upgrades to Google Reader.

Google Reader gets a new feature which recommends new RSS feeds to you–based on your current feeds and web history–and also receives "drag & drop" functionality–allowing you to re-order your feeds and easily move them to new folders.

Both new features were the handy work of ex-interns at Google!

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What with social network APIs and mobile phones, Google has gotten all open and loving all of a sudden. It’s next step in taking over the world is the trial of OpenID for Blogger in Draft (it’s testing area for Blogger).

With the adoption of OpenID, commenters on Blogger blogs will be able to use their “one login fits all” username and password when leaving a comment.

Google hopes to test the feature before deploying it to all Blogger accounts and also hints at letting you use your Blogger domain as your ID for commenting at other blogs.

With the popularity of Flickr photo sharing site, some people get shortchanged for their work. Two sites are finding ways to compensate the photographer and the bloggers who post their photos.

I learned about photo money for bloggers first from Photrade, at BlogWorldExpo. Now stock photography company Corbis is offering bloggers to use some of their images free. The images have ads embedded in them (and show up when you mouse over them) or the ad is an overlay on top of the image.

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Internet advertising as a whole is steadily rising. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) announced in early October that Internet advertising has reached a new record of $4.9 billion for the first quarter of 2007. Last year first quarter revenues were at $3.8 billion - a 26 percent increase.

I recently read a MarketingSherpa article on one type of online advertising that is making a small comeback. Some call them banner ads some call them online display ads, but according to MarketingSherpa, they are back in vogue. Why? They are lower cost other online advertising methods. MarketingSherpa published a helpful introduction to this advertising medium.

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Woah. I almost usurped the “Pilgrim’s Picks” title. Freudian, I’m sure.

• Conde Nast is appealing to viewers where they already are: CondéNet Strikes Content Distribution Deal With YouTube
• LinkedIn CEO wouldn’t sell for a BEEEELLION dollars. No, really.
• Conde Nast isn’t the only one making deals video deals: NBCU Pacts With Netflix On Next-Day TV Show Downloads. Too bad they’re about to run out of new shows. And no Law & Order. *pout*

This should come as no surprise from the people who’d sue you to stop you from linking to them: at a publishers’ consortium today, after complaining about the limited nature of robots.txt, the newspaper industry has proposed new standards to prevent search engines (and other sites) from indexing their sites willy-nilly.

This has been in the works since September of last year, when Andy called it like he saw it: “Publishers to Spend Half Million Dollars on a Robots.txt File.” Granted, it’s not just a robots.txt file—but it’s not too far off.

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It’s been so long since I’ve been able to write about Facebook every day. I’m gonna relish this while I can. BusinessWeek reports today that Facebook may be tweaking the ill-received Project Beacon. These changes could come as soon as November 29—aka today.

BusinessWeek points out, accurately IMHO, that as Facebook tweaks the system to assuage its disgruntled users, it runs the risk of upsetting its advertisers and partners:

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