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Oct 23, 2008 at 1:42pm Eastern by Barry Schwartz    Google AdWords: Now With Images Some AdWords ads on Google are now showing associated images — and getting much larger in the space they take up — through a “Show products from” Plus Box implementation that some are seeing now when searching at Google. For example, try search for bluenile, which brings up a Blue Nile ad. Under the usual ad title and description is a plus symbol (called a Plus Box), followed by the words, “Show products from Blue Nile for bluenile.” If you click on the box, it opens up three product listings from Blue Nile, each listing with an associated image. The most shocking part of this ad is that how much room it takes up. Here is the ad when it is closed: When you click to open up the product results, the whole visible part of the page is consumed with this one ad. Here is an image of just the ad, that measures about 370 pixels tall for me: The ad also shows on the right hand side, as Steve Rubel shows. I was able to replicate Steve’s findings, by searching for diamonds. This implementation is better, in my opinion, because it does not change how the natural/free results are shown but rather only pushes down other ads on the right hand side. Images associated with search ads are not too surprising. We have seen implementations of video ads in AdWords several times. It just seems to me that Google is willing to try anything now when it comes to ads, from video to images to multimedia and who knows what. Do note that back in November of last year January, I reported that Google was testing product results within AdWords. But those product results seemed to have been powered by Google Base and did not contain product images. Google has also been testing showing banner ads in image search.

Calling All SEOs and Webmasters: Google Wants You Click to enlarge Now through Sept. 30th, Google is looking once again to its community of developers to help guide others and contribute short tutorial videos to their Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The basic requirements are as follows: - Keep the video short: Approximately 3-5 minutes. - Think small: A short video is a good way to showcase your use of Top Search Queries, but not long enough to highlight an entire SEO strategy. - Focus on a real-life example of how you used a particular feature: For example, you could show how you used link data to research your brand, or crawl errors to diagnose problems with your site structure. Do you have a great tip or recommendation? (Go here for a complete list of requirements and submit all videos through their help center.) This is not the first time Google has reached out, nor is it something new to the industry. The site is billed as a one-stop shop for webmaster resources that helps with crawling and indexing questions, as well as introducing offerings to enhance and increase site traffic. The YouTube channel has more than 5,000 subscribers and 113 uploaded tutorials since launching in January.

Oct 9, 2008 at 3:00pm Eastern by Matt McGee    Google Starts To Classify Content Types In Web Search Like other search engines, Google already distinguishes between various types of content. You can search specifically for images, videos, books, blog posts, and so forth. Google has separate search engines for each. But two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that’s gathered from ordinary web pages. Search Engine Roundtable points to a discussion on WebmasterWorld about the addition of dates at the beginning of some search results — something Michael Gray spotted in mid-September. From my personal experience, this seems to be happening mostly on content that Google can identify as blog posts and news articles — but not exclusively on those types of content. And speaking of identifying types of content, Google Operating System points out that Google is starting to show special forum-related information in search results when it can identify that the result comes from a message board. Author Alex Chitu suggests this could mean new advanced search options in the future: This new feature shows that Google is able to automatically classify web pages and to extract relevant information. Once Google starts to show data for other kinds of web pages, we can expect to see an option to restrict the search results to a certain category (forums, reviews, blogs, news articles). The screenshot above has examples of both cases, the top showing dates in the snippets, and the bottom showing forum information.