Getting The Call From Google!!!

I just got a call from Google - what a surprise. I didn't realise Google employed real people! But to receive a call out of the blue from the Google AdWords Jump Start team offering really useful help with AdWords was quite a shock. The person on the other end of the phone was really helpful offering to send reports and market research papers and to help build out my AdWords campaigns. Support lasts 30 days and is free of charge but is limited to advertisers spending over £30 per day. Higher level support is available to corporate customers spending over £150 per day which works out at something like £54,000 per year. I am guessing this is a reflection of how important pay-per-click revenue is to Google. I am also guessing that this new interest in customer service is connected with the iminent launch of Microsoft AdCenter in the UK sometime this month. We will keep you posted.

Google maintains top spot with 56% market share

Google maintains top spot with 56% market share: "Google is still the UK's leading search portal with a 56% share of the market compared to Yahoo!'s 37% and MSN's 14%, according to data from Hitwise"

What are the Strongest Directories?

This is a great article from the people at Aviva Directory who have applied the Seomoz page strength tool to rank the relative importance and visibility of paid directories. The top 10 were as follows:

dir.yahoo.com
www.dmoz.org (not a paid directory)
www.business.com
www.exactseek.com
www..elib.org
www.familyfriendlysites.com
www.uncoverthenet.com
www.botw.org
www.chiff.com
www.ezilon.com

For a more comprehensive list of directories take a look at this post from Bob Mutch.

Sitemaps to Google Webmaster Central

Here's a great in depth review from SEOmoz of Google's new Webmaster Central service which replaces sitemaps (and including its old functionality). See the full article here. There's a lot of material to cover, so let's dive in: Above, we can see the start page for Google Webmaster Central once you've verified a site (this can be done by uploading an HTML file, or by editing a meta tag on the site). Once I'm in, I see both www.seomoz.org and seomoz.org are listed as verified, and there's the additional tools, including report spam and submit a re-iniclusion request. Almost ironic in its dichotomy, eh? Next, we've got the indexing summary page, showing me the variety of problems that Google's had when crawling the SEOmoz.org site. They give you the last crawl date and let me know that I should consider submitting a sitemap and reviewing the files they're having trouble accessing. When we dig a bit deeper, we can see exactly which pages they had trouble crawling full article.... For more info on how to use Google Sitemaps see www.ju2.com