“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

Some people commented that there also seems to be even more reliance on the search term in the URL than before. Does that mean that Propeller, Digg, Technorati etc. are not going to get their due respect by Yahoo?

I haven’t got more details from Yahoo as yet on this update. Will post in details once I get more information…

Cheers,
Vinai - Editor  TheSeoBible.com

What is Automatic Matching anyway?
Automatic matching means that Google will try to maximize your ad spend upto your daily limit, if it is not fully used up by the usual search and content networks.

They do it by showing your ads on keywords that you have not bid yourself, but which Google thinks are relevant for you. So for example “used cars”, Google may automatically show your ad for “car seats”, even though you are not bidding on this keyword at all. Your ads will now show for additional relevant search queries based on the keywords, ad text, and landing pages in your ad groups.

Your adwords account will show this alert if automatic matching is enabled on your account - “New! Automatic matching has been enabled in your account.

You can then opt out by visiting a keyword-targeted campaign, and then clicking on edit campaign settings.”

Also, in your ad groups, at the bottom of your keyword list, you’ll see a new column labeled “Automatic matching total.”

Now, there is nothing really wrong with Automatic Matching per se. It is similar to Content Matching, which used to show poor results when it was launched initially, but improved dramatically over the years, and now a lot of people only rely on Adsense traffic for their sites.

You can leave it on if you are tracking your conversions from the adwords and know which keywords, ad groups are generating what kind of ROI.

Automatic matching is Google’s attempt to maximize your clicks, and at the same time clean out your account of any remaining value from your daily budget. This will definitely boost Google’s revenue from those unsuspecting adwords spenders, who leave everything to Google.

So How do you take advantage of Automatic Matching Option.

Of course, the only thing missing from this Automatic matching option of Google is to set bid prices for this option. Hopefully, it will appear some time soon…. ( are you listening Google?)

The fact is - Google is a very dynamic company, and Adwords is their revenue generating vehicle - which is why they are constantly making changes to it, to maximize the revenue for themselves, and deliver more value to us advertisers. You need to be always looking for changes, testing them, and see how it works.

I subscribe to Perry Marshall’s Mastermind group, which send out updates as and when there is a major change from Google, and I get a chance to ask questions directly ( every month ) to the Adwords Gurus Perry Marshall and Bryan Todd - both authors of the Most Definitive Guide to Google Adwords ( read my Review of this Best Adwords Book on The SEO Bible’s SEO Tool Review section).

To get more information, you can check out these excellent resources too

Search Engine Land

SEO Round Table

Search Engine Money Making

9 Things I dislike about Google’s Automatic Matching - Very Good - I saved the best for the last!

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While we had been noticing the changes in SERPS from the end of March, this is the first “official” announcements from Google. It has caused major furore and the search rankings have been going up and down wildly.

This kind of major changes are expected every time Google does major changes without announcing… You can expect the same thing when Google launches its own version of Wikipedia. Currently, the Wikipedia results are omnipresent - almost the first in every search… but when Google brings out its own products, there always seems to be a major update just around that time…

You can read more as the story unfolds at
Screwy Dewey Update
Webmasterworld Forums

So now that Google Books results are going to show up atleast 2-3 times on the first page, this leaves only 7 to 8 spots for us morons to show up on the first page. Well, like it or not, there’s nothing much we can do… so get up and start testing & tweaking your pages to maintain your ranking and better it!

Lesson Learnt: Never become too complacent - even if you hold the top spot or first page rankings, you never know what’s going to hit you tomorrow. So continue to build those links, and continue to add new content to help you in the long run. If you rely on too much traffic from just 1 search engine, too bad. The only thing is to make your content so good and compelling that people keep coming back to you, pass your link around, and you build the good will that will help you survive the War of the first page.

Cheers,
Vinai
Editor, The SEO Bible

• No more tabs! Navigate through the new sidebar, which is much easier to access.
• Breadcrumbs in the page title for easier product navigation.
• The left sidebar that expands and contracts to show and hide options based on your current goal.
• Additions to the Sidebar topics: Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

And Webmaster Tools is now available in 20 languages. In addition to US English, UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Polish, Webmaster Tools are now in Turkish and Romanian.

Sign in to see these changes for yourself. For questions or feedback, please post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of Webmaster Help Group.

Cheers,
Vinai

James Prout from Holt Michigan says:

“When I came on board and signed up for the Bobsled Run, it was just like you say, “your wife thinks your crazy for spending ‘that kind of money’ on a dream.”

I went into the Bobsled Run with high hopes and expectations because of some of the other testimonies in the previous Runs. They stated 5X increases and so forth. I was pretty skeptical about our business making a 5X increase in so short a time. But, I could live with a 2X increase. I actually said to my Wife, “If we can get a 2X increase in the next few months, then keep growing it from there, you wouldn’t have to go back to work in the Fall.” (background: my wife is a school teacher). Talk about pressure.

Previously, November was our biggest month ever at over $24,000. That was a good month.

However, January topped it at $25,600

Feb: over $30,000

March: $42,000. This was huge and about doubled what we were making before. We did it in only 2 real months of work.

I took a breather these last few weeks. Just this last week my wife gave birth to our third child. A little baby girl. Her older siblings greeted her into the family with love. Through all this, I couldn’t help thinking that because of the Bobsled Run with Perry Marshall, my wife won’t have to work outside the house anymore.”

James Prout
Holt, Michigan

Get the rest of James’ story (and literally a dozen others)

Click to Continue

To your success,

Vinai