Google sent out an email stating that they will now only display 1 advertisement per URL per keyword. Additionally people no longer need to signify their ads are affiliate ads since there is only one ad per URL.

They multiply CTR * max bid to determine the effective ad rank, and the top ad rank for any URL will be the ad that is displayed.

Lots of dynamic keyword insertion noise (such as eBay affiliates) have been ruining the relevancy of their ads so this one step they are taking to try to keep them relevant.

This change will have no effect of white label affiliate sites since they are on their own separate URLs. Some people will probably also find ways to bounce their affiliate ads to get around this change.

The email they sent out is in the extended entry. Google AdWords™ Announcement:
Affiliate Policy Change Google

Hello from the Google AdWords Team:

In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser experience.

What is changing:

With this new affiliate policy, we'll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad's maximum cost-per-click (price) and clickthrough rate (performance).

For instance, if a user searches for books on Google.com or anywhere on the Google search and content networks, Google will take an inventory of ads running for the keyword books. If we find that two or more ads compete under the same URL, we'll display the ad with the highest Ad Rank.

How this will affect you:

If you're an affiliate, this means that you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate in your ad text. However, your current ad text will continue to display your affiliate status until you change it.

Affiliates or advertisers using unique URLs in their ads will not be affected by this change. Please note that your Display URL must match the URL of your landing page, and you may not simply frame another site.

What you should do:

We recommend that you continue to monitor your ads' performance and optimize your ads as needed to ensure they're bringing you the best results. Please visit our Optimization Tips page for more information.

By improving our ad relevancy, we believe that users will have a better search experience, which will help you reach more potential clients in the future. We'll continue to make improvements to AdWords over time to further improve the user experience and help increase the performance of your ads.

We look forward to continue providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

Disclaimer: As a business Google must make decisions regarding the advertising we accept. As stated in our Terms and Conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when reviewing AdWords ads created within the program. This only concerns our advertising and in no way affects the search results we deliver. Google offers broad access to content across the web without censoring results.

Contact us: If you have any questions, please contact your Google representative or email us at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py.

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important new AdWords features.

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>Google offers broad access to content across the web without censoring results.

Does anyone buy that Google is not forced to censor some stuff? I don't...

This is a bit of an off topic / personal type post. I guess many of them are that way now, but you have been warned ;)

My Brother...
was recently conned (by me) into creating a blog. I think everyone should have one. If for nothing else then at least for tracking your own thought process over time.

Creating Another Unoriginal Crap Site:
He originally wanted to create a site selling random junk he sold a bit of out of a catalog when he was a teenager.

Do What You are Interested In:
I wanted him to create a blog about something he knew about or was interested in to help introduce him to the web. My brother has HIV and since that is a somewhat important topic I figured that maybe he could do a blog about HIV.

I bought him a domain name and spent about $20 submitting his site to a few directories and off he went.

Being Personal:
I have actually been rather impressed with how frequently he has posted. Usually he just posts news as he finds it (which seems a bit dull to me), but occassionally he also posts exceptionally personal stuff - which is what makes a site real.

I do not think he has done much to promote his site, but randomly it ranks #3 on MSN Canada for HIV.

MSN Search Memory Lane:
It always feels good to see someone ranking well in MSN...it is a megacorp that is helping to spread your site and / or message. It reminds me of creating content by the keyword to submit to Zeal back when LookSmart was a primary feed to MSN. Back then it took less than a week to register a domain, host it, create, submit, and approve the content necissary to rank on the first page of MSN for almost any single word search query.

As an SEO Blogger You KNOW there are too many SEO Blogs When...
Your brother recently created a blog about search engines (as my brother did).

I could look at it and say "well he needs to do a bunch of learning" as many may look at this blog and say to me. I remember when I first made my other site about search engines and people emailed me nasty hate mail (I still get some, but for other reasons).

Who knows, he may be at the same spot I was a year and a half ago and may be far better off than I am in a year or two. I am interested to see what his level of commitment will be and what else he wants to learn and what other projects he will jump into.

The Secret Sauce:
The hidden secret of SEO for people new to the craft is that keyword density only really matters up until people are actually interested in reading your site.

You only need to figure out how to reach a few people in any industry. If Danny Sullivan likes your site then many in the search industry will too, by default.

It doesn't take much for a person to do well if they are honest, willing to work hard, interested in what they are doing, and learn quickly.

I look at my brother's posts and see that they are perhaps a bit rough (as are many of mine), but I also look and see that it looks like he is trying to find his voice and is trying to figure out how to sound like a person, which is something most sites do not do. Best of luck bro...

I was in and out around the end of the year and just finally got back home in a somewhat stable state today. It looks as though Google has finally updated toolbar PageRank again, and I have been reading bits about the horrible tsunami.

To try my best to help out, for the month of January I am going to send all my SEO Book sales income to help out with relief from the storm. I think Paypal eats about $2 out of each order, but other than that the remainder will go to help out Sarvodaya.

If you want to help out you can donate directly to any of the tsunami relief funds.

The Passing Years:
Battelle reviews his predictions for 2004 and posts his predictions for 2005. Peter D reviews search in 2004. Search engines release their top searches of 2004.

Kottke posts his favorite links of 2004. Good posts like Radiohead in there - can't believe I got to see them this yr :)

Doodles:
Guy trashes Google's Doodle and gets called out on their blog. Wondering if there is something I can say to Google to get them to link to me from their blog?

Quality feedback (both positive and negative) is a good link building strategy for many. Too bad Google did not serve up a link :(

Selling Out:
iProspect nets 32 million dollars
InfoSearch Media goes public in a reverse merger
SEO Book.com acquired by <-- joking ;)

Linking Schemes:
Google slowed the spread of selling PageRank when they penalized SearchKing, but now there are a bunch of easy (and sometimes cheap) ways to build linkage data which manipulate search results:

• blog comment spam (free - other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)

• legitimate blog comments (free)
• blogrolls (free)
• trackbacks (free)
• wiki spamming (free - other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)
• forum spamming (free - other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)
• guestbook spamming (free - other than bandwidth costs and potential reputation costs)
• leaving testimonials (free - other than potential reputation costs)
• tell someone just how awful they are (free - other than potential reputation costs)
• writing press releases (free - other than the time it takes to write. to distribute on some of the release sites there might be a small fee)
• renting links from websites (cheap - sometimes you can get links from sites for well under their market value. some bloggers and the like may sell links for $5 to $10 a month)
• renting links from brokers or a third party link renting site (usually a bit more expensive than some of the other options, but you are paying for convenience, and they may get you on some sites that you could not have afforded if you had to pay that site directly)
• registering in directories (usually free or cheap one off payments)
• participating in community linking programs (free or cheap)
• support non profits and the like for links (free or cheap - It doesn't cost me anything to give away my ebook or for a software vendor to give away software. some charities may also provide long lasting or perminant links for a one off fee.)
• general reciprocal links (free - other than time)
• using RSS to get a ton of links (free)
• creating your own link network (cheap - only need to pay hosting and design costs - though if you create link scheme networks you will want to have a good number of them that are not cross connected so if your network gets penalized you still have other income sources.)
• buying out old sites and fixing them up (cheap - I have been offered top level category sites in DMOZ which were one of the top three or four sites in their category as ordered by PageRank in the Google Directory for a one off $2,000 fee.)
• buying out old community sites and entering them into community linking programs (cheap)
• renting links on a site and entering those link slots into a community linking program (cheap - pay for links from one site and get links from a wide variety of sites.)
• actually posting things people would want to link to (free)
• lots of other stuff I probably forgot to post...

Google slowed the spread of selling PageRank when they penalized SearchKing, but there are a bunch of easy (and often cheap) ways to build linkage data.

What constitutes a linking scheme? What makes one link valid and another one not? Automated, deceptive, and "for the user" are easy words to use, but then there are also legitimate and cheap techniques that have exceptional power over relevancy. At the end of the day it is just a game of semantics.

Many people say PPI directories are rubbish - but that's what Yahoo is and unfortunately people pay to list there.

We can say 'well Yahoo isn't an intentional manipulation of PageRank' (or in a special class) - well what makes them special?

The fact that they played the game of the web early and now a leader is the answer :source

Christmas Cards & Gifts:
Thanks to those who sent me cards and stuff - I appreciate it. I still have not went to the post office with any of the cards and stuff I bought, so the ones I send out - if I ever send them out - will be new years cards ;)

I actually do not feel as Screwdgelike as I normally do, I just have been scatterbrained and a bit busy.

Thanks to

• those who gave me good ideas;

• those who taught me;
• those who inspired me;
• those who helped me;
• those who invited me to hang out;
• those who brought me to the best curry in the world;
• those who recommended me;
• those who gave me feedback;
• those who told me when I was all hosed up;
• those who bought my ebook;
• those who worked with me; &
• those who are reading this post.

Moving:
So I moved hosts on my other site to Pair yesterday (lots of savvy webmasters have recommended them to me). While I was still uploading the site the DNS already propagated through to the new location. I had to learn how to play with some .htaccess fast ;)

Broken Links:
After I moved I checked my site using Xenu and found a ton of broken links I need to update. Some stuff doesn't make any sense, like the Virtual Library's contact us and registration pages no longer exist.

While on the Topic of Directories:
Free Christmas gifts...

I have been doing tons of directory submissions recently, and thus know many directory owners. The following directories are giving away listings to the first 3 people who leave a comment below. After you comment find your relevant categories and give me your info via email me at seobook [At} gmail dot com using "free directory submission" as the subject and I will submit your sites for you.*

• SevenSeek - John Scott's directory. He also has been thinking about eventually create a portal and search engine on that site.

• Web Atlas - Nandini Maheshwari's fairly new directory. I have been helping her build up some good link popularity, and Web Atlas provides mutliple deep links with each listing.
• Uncover the Net - Shawn Walter's somewhat new directory. I believe his directory has more pages in Google's cache than any other directory. He also recently create an affiliate program.
• Rubber Stamped - Peter Da Vanzo's brand spanking new directory. Peter is a bit of a link hound, so look for him to build some good link popularity on the quick.

* Please no lead generation, affiliate, pharmacy, porn, insurance, debt, or gambling type websites. If your website is making you thousands of dollars per day please do not submit via this offer. :)