I can remember only a few years ago, if a company was letting an employee go or the employee left a 2 week notice, most employees would try to leave on good terms so they can use the company as a reference. There was not much of a benefit for the company to “take care� of this leaving employee. My, how things have changed. Enter the bloggers.

When was the last time you went to Google, Yahoo, and MSN and searched your first and last name and your company’s name? You may be unpleasantly surprised. If one of your employees has a personal blog or forum they post on, a simple statement like “I worked for -insert your company name here- and they suck because….� can end up being on the first page of some of the top search engines.

Yahoo’s Click Fraud Suit has finally come to an end. Unlike Google’s settlement where they would give you adwords credit, Yahoo may be dishing out cash to their advertisers.

Yahoo’s response to the suit: “We’re very pleased with this important settlement because it not only validates the strength of the search marketing industry and the effectiveness of our system, but also it allows us to move forward to work more closely with our advertisers and others across the industry to fight click fraud. ”

Not sure why they are so “pleased?” I am sure they are happy the actual suit is over, but I am not convinced this is the last we will see of click fraud issues with Yahoo, Google, and other engines.

Going over the AdLab’s site and viewing the demo’s is a must.

What can AdLab’s do for you? According to Microsoft:

• Search Funnels: Customers tend to search by entering related keywords in certain sequences. You can use the adCenter Search Funnels tool to help you visualize and analyze these search behaviors through incoming and outgoing queries.
• Search Clustering: Microsoft adCenter’s Search Result Clustering (SRC) technology can cluster search results into semantically related groups in real time and then help your customers browse through the long list of search results. SRC can:

1. Disambiguate queries that may produce contradictory results
2. Display subtopics for search queries
3. Display facts about people
4. Show relationships among people
5. Return answers when the query is a question

You have until July 30 to set your time zone in your Google AdWords account. You should definitely take advantage of this option if you are using their new Day Parting tool.

When you created your Google AdWords account, the account automatically defaulted to Pacific Standard Time. According to Google, “Your time zone determines the official “working day” for your AdWords account.” In otherwords, if you are in the Eastern Time Zone and set your account to be off from 6pm to 9am, your account will actually turn off 9pm est and will turn back on 12pm est.