SEO Earnings

At the Javits Convention Center in New York next week, the Yahoo! Search team will speak on five SMX East panels to address a number of industry topics, including spam, URLs and domains, design techniques, and enhanced listings. Also, the team will offer answers to your questions and give you a behind-the-scenes look at search engines in the "Ask the Search Engines" SEO Track on Wednesday. Check out our line-up and stop by if you're in the neighborhood. You can find the team at the Meet & Eat tables during lunch on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday too. Tuesday, October 7th Time: 10:45 a.m. - noon Session: What is Spam? Description: Search representatives share their views on what search spam is. Yahoo!: Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering Time: 1:30 - 2:45 p.m. Session: Unraveling URLs & Demystifying Domains Description: This session looks at a variety of URL and domain name issues you should consider to increase your success with SEO. Yahoo!: Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering Time: 3:15 - 4:30 p.m. Session: CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 and SEO Description: CSS, AJAX and Web 2.0 dynamic design techniques can cause search engine indexing and ranking issues. This session examines solutions to consider. Yahoo!: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search Time: 3:15 - 4:30 p.m. Session: Enhanced Listings Description: Search engines are moving towards enhanced listings. How can search marketers tap into them? Yahoo!: Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products Wednesday, October 8th Time: 2:30 - 3:30 p.m. Session: Ask the Search Engines (SEO Track) Description: This Q&A panel gives a behind-the-scenes look at how things work in the world of indexing and ranking pages. Yahoo!: Sean Suchter, VP of Engineering The Yahoo! Search Marketing team is speaking on a number of other panels as well, so be sure to check out the conference site for more details on their whereabouts. Hope to see you there. Yahoo! Search Blog team

With just over a month until the 2008 United States Presidential Election, there is quite a bit of activity ahead and certainly a lot to keep up with. To help you get quick updates on the candidates, election news, polling numbers, and more on a state and national level, Yahoo! Search is launching a series of new election shortcuts. Pulling information directly from the Yahoo! News elections hub as well as the political dashboard, the shortcuts provide fresh, up-to-date information. If you're interested in what's going on with a particular candidate, simply search [Obama] or [McCain] and get up-to-date information on poll results, recent headlines and relevant discussions. We're also including a short bio, photos and videos to thumb through when you search for candidates. If you're just looking for a quick snapshot of the race, search [presidential election] and Yahoo! Search will give you a shortcut with fresh results on Obama and McCain news and national poll averages. You can also learn how to register to vote by following the link in the shortcut. If you're curious about a specific state and want to hone in on its election news and polls, just add it to the search box (e.g. California presidential election). And in honor of the upcoming 56th presidential election, we've made some changes to the search results page when you search for election related queries. Click the "VOTE" badge in the top right hand corner to be taken directly to the Yahoo! News election page. Try it out before the big day on November 4th and let us know what you think in the comments below. Yuko Kamae Yahoo! Search

As you may know, you can set up your custom channels so that they're targetable by advertisers - these targetable custom channels are known as ad placements. By selecting the 'Allow advertisers to target this channel' checkbox on the channel creation page, you can enable brand advertisers to target their content to your audience directly on a CPM or CPC basis.Creating ad placements allows them to show up in AdWords, so that advertisers who create placement-targeted campaigns can include your content directly. What many publishers don't know is that this also makes your content available to Google's internal sales teams, who work closely with many advertisers looking to target a certain audience or type of content. With this in mind, we thought it would be important to mention a few best practices which will help advertisers and our internal sales teams target your content to help you maximize revenue:First, take time to make sure your channel names and descriptions accurately describe your content and audience. By including descriptions that closely reflect your content, you'll also attract advertisers from those areas. Naming and descriptions are important. On that note, our second tip: be very careful about changing the name of an ad placement. If an advertiser has already targeted one of your specific channels, the channel will become unavailable to the advertiser once you change its name. If you wish to rename a channel, we recommend creating a second channel with the new name, and then attaching both channels to your ad unit. Remember, you can attach up to five custom channels to an ad unit.Third, use the 300x250 medium rectangle, opted in to both text and image ads. This is one type of targetable ad unit that's in high demand by Google's CPM advertisers. We recommend placing these units in line with your content, and describing them as they relate to the content. This combination of format and placement enables advertisers to use image, text, or rich media (including gadget ads) effectively. In feeds, we recommend opting in to both image and text in all ad units, as many of these advertisers only target with image ads into feeds.Finally, as always, the most important tip for maximizing revenue from your ad placements is to create quality content that is visually appealing and attracts a quality audience. Many brand advertisers look at all placements before placing an advertising order to make sure the destination sites are in line with their brand and attract the type of audience they wish to target for a particular campaign.Posted by Steve Olechowski - AdSense Product Manager

As part of Yahoo!'s Breast Cancer Awareness Month initiative, Yahoo! Search is announcing a new Infobar built on the SearchMonkey platform that will help Search users make donations to help find a cure for breast cancer without spending an extra dime. We teamed up with the non-profit organization Susan G. Komen for the Cure to build a SearchMonkey app that is displayed under Yahoo! Search results for dozens of popular shopping sites like Amazon, HP and REI.com. If users click "Shop" and complete a purchase, the affiliate commission will go directly to Susan G. Komen for the Cure -- 7.5% of the purchase price, on average. And to encourage folks to use the enhancement, called Search for a Cause, Yahoo! will donate a dollar for every user that adds the application up to $25,000. The country's challenging economic situation is making the already difficult task of fundraising even tougher for non-profits. We're hoping Search for a Cause will provide a way for concerned people to donate to a great cause by simply adding the SearchMonkey app and using it when you shop online. And if you want to donate directly to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, here's the link. We're also hoping people will tell their friends and family about Search for a Cause. You can tell them to search for terms like "breast cancer," "Susan G. Komen" or "pink ribbon" at Yahoo!. Come tomorrow, they'll see a pinkified results page and a pink ribbon to click on and add the app. Working with a number of teams here at Yahoo!, including SearchMonkey, Yahoo! for Good, Yahoo! Health, and front page, it's been a group effort to build awareness around breast cancer and we're happy to be a part of it. A special thanks goes out to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Graham Mudd & Hilda Chan Yahoo! Search

Late last year we welcomed Thai to our AdSense for search family, and we're now excited to let you know about the launch of AdSense for content in Thai. If you're a publisher with a Thai website, you'll now be able to earn money for valid clicks and impressions for Google ads on your site. Get started by logging in to your account and visiting the AdSense Setup tab to generate ad code. Or, if you don't have an AdSense account yet, review our program policies and then feel free to submit an application.To celebrate this launch, why not look up a few Thai recipes and prepare traditional dishes like Som Tum, a spicy green papaya salad, or Tom Yam, a hot and sour soup? We hope they'll leave you content and ready to create new content of your own.ยินดีต้อนรับสู่โปรแกรมของเราค่ะ Posted by Nopparat Yokubon - AdSense Thai Publisher Support

As the summer draws to a close, it is with a heavy heart that I bring you our last Newbie Friday post. I hope you've enjoyed our words of wisdom over the past few months and have found the information useful. Our team will continue to update this blog with the most up-to-date AdSense news and information, so please don't let this be goodbye. If you missed part of the series or want to re-read specific posts, just visit our Newbie label at any time and look for our summer-themed logo. So, from one oldie to many newbies, I'll close out this season with a few final tips for our new publishers.Go wide and get rich (media)If you've just recently started with AdSense, there are two format-related tips I would instantly recommend. The first is to enable both text and image ads, which will increase competition among ads to appear in your ad units and may result in higher CPMs. Second, use some of our wider units, such as the 160x600 wide skyscraper, the 300x250 medium rectangle, or the 728x90 leaderboard. There are more rich media (image, flash, video and gadget) ads available in wider ad formats, and wider ad units are the preferred formats for advertisers looking to target your site. Again, increased competition or your ad space will help you maximise your earnings potential.Use channelsChannels are powerful reporting tools, sometimes overlooked by new publishers. They allow you to view the AdSense performance of a site, a specific page, or even a specific ad unit, which can help you see where your ads are performing best. You can name these channels, give them descriptions, and then define them as ad placements so that they are visible to AdWords advertisers.The secretAs top AdSense earners will tell you, when it comes to earning with AdSense, the most important thing is a policy-compliant site with good-quality, original content. Such sites attract users, relevant ads and, ultimately, revenue.Finally, we constantly maintain online resources like our AdSense Help Forum, Newbie Central, and our Known Issues page to share useful information with you. We hope you'll use them to make the most of AdSense.Posted by Lucy McKenna - AdSense UK Publisher Support

Two weeks ago, we announced that the BOSS Mashable Challenge was on. Since then, we've heard a lot of interest in BOSS and seen some great submissions, but we want to give you a little more time to work on your hacks. So we're extending the deadline to October 5th. Don't forget the winner will receive $2000 and a nod on Mashable. See some of the recent submissions from this week and last week on Mashable and start hacking now. BOSS Team

If you've added an AdSense for search box to your page, you're probably aware of the relevant search results it provides your users. That being said, a few publishers have asked us if it’s a violation of our program policies to perform searches in their own AdSense for search boxes. The short answer is no, this activity is not explicitly prohibited by our program policies.However, we strongly advise against using your own AdSense for search box for a couple of reasons. First, it can increase the chance of accidental or invalid clicks on the ads that appear on the search results pages. Second, this will inflate the number of queries in your reports, giving you an inaccurate picture of the activity on your site.If you’d like to use Google search, we recommend visiting Google.com or installing the Google Toolbar. And if you're using Google Chrome, don't forget that you can type search queries directly into your address bar.Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

We've recently been testing a number of options for a new SearchMonkey Enhanced Results template. Today, we're officially transitioning to a new layout. While the basic components of the templates are the same, you'll notice that the deep links are now horizontally aligned under the title link and the image is now on the right-hand side. Why? Based on A/B testing, eye tracking and usability research, we've found that this format is more easily scanned by users and often results in higher clickthrough rates for app developers. If you're a SearchMonkey developer or partner, rest assured that apps built using the previous template will transition to the new template automatically. And in the process of doing this research, we put together a one-page best practices document to help you design SearchMonkey apps that provide an optimal user experience (available here as well). As with anything we do, these changes to SearchMonkey are all about making searching better for everyone. For more on the new design, head to the YDN Blog. And let us know if you have any questions or comments below. Prasad Kantamneni & Stacy All Researchers, Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search is hitting the road and hacking at a university near you. Our University Hack Day tour, Hack U, offers interested students the opportunity to partake in a week of learning and hacking with tech talks, hacking tips and lessons, and hands-on coding workshops. From now till October 25th, we're heading to six schools across the country and giving students access to APIs and tools in the Yahoo! Developer Network, including SearchMonkey and Yahoo! Search BOSS (at Stanford and Berkeley only). We kicked things off at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this week, where 40 students joined us for a day of monkeying with Yahoo! Search. We've already seen a bunch of great ideas from the UIUC students. Here's a few photos from the SearchMonkey Brain Jam event on Tuesday. We'll be sure to share some of our favorite hacks after the Hack U tour wraps up. At Hack U, you can win prizes, a spot in the Yahoo! Search Gallery and a chance to represent your school at the University Hack Showdown in California in next spring. If you're interested in participating or want more information on where we're heading and when, check out the sign-up page. Past University Hacks are here as well. Graham Mudd Yahoo! Search

Readers with sharp eyes will notice that on some rare occasions, your ads may appear or act slightly differently than what you're accustomed to. Rest assured that this is normal behavior that results from our efforts to improve the experience for all members of the advertising ecosystem. (You may have noticed a similar post about our search results on the official Google blog.)One way in which we achieve this is by making continued tweaks and innovations to the user behavior and appearance of our ads. In the past, these experiments have included changes to the font styling, coloring, spacing, and other aesthetic components. More specifically, changes such as redesigned ad units and arrows to show additional ads have stemmed from these tests. The purpose of these tests is to identify changes to our product that can bring long-term benefits to our publishers, your site's visitors, and advertisers. Before rolling out a change to our ads, we test performance for a limited number of ad impressions, which may not apply to all publishers. Although we don't notify publishers of these specific changes in order to prevent bias, we closely monitor the performance of these tests. We also welcome feedback from publishers, users, and advertisers, so feel free to drop us an email. Posted by Keith Mander - AdSense Product Specialist

About a year ago Yahoo! Search launched a music artist shortcut to make it easier for users to find quick details about artists -- like videos, photos, sample song tracks, and even their official website links -- directly from the search results page. This evening, we're rolling out some key enhancements as part of our partnership with Rhapsody. Now, in addition to gaining access to all of the artist background that you could before, you'll also be able to play up to 25 full songs a month, as opposed to the 30-second samples from before. And, by tapping into the vast catalog of songs available on Rhapsody, we're expanding the number of audio files that are available for playback and increasing the number of tracks in the shortcut from three songs to four. If you want to look over a greater list of songs, you'll also be able to link directly to Yahoo! Music right from the shortcuts; full song playback will soon be enabled in Yahoo! Music as well, so stay tuned. Now you'll be able to listen to Rihanna, sing along to Madonna and JT or rock out to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs without having to leave the search results page or type in a log-in. Simply click your song of choice and the new media player from Yahoo! Music, called FoxyPlayer, will launch near the bottom of the page. The player is easy-to-use and offers full functionality for song playback, like artist and song info and even an expandable playlist tab. You'll be able to continue browsing the results page while the player is in use or turn it off at any time with a single click. Try it out and search for some of your favorites. We'll continue to work with Rhapsody to showcase more of their deep music catalog in the near future, so keep your eyes (and ears) open for even more artists and songs. For more information on our partnership with Rhapsody, check out the Music Help Pages. Greg Makris Yahoo! Search

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, you can use your AdSense account to display ads on any policy-compliant sites you own. This has often sparked the question among new publishers of 'How many sites do I need to earn money with AdSense?'We'd like to stress that it's not the number of sites you have, but the quality of those sites that will help you increase your earnings with AdSense. If you're just getting started with your first website and the AdSense program, we recommend taking the time to build up your site with plenty of original, quality content -- write about topics you're passionate about, or which you have expertise in. When designing your website, keep our Webmaster Guidelines and, most importantly, your users in mind. Then, take advantage of our Webmaster Tools to help increase your site's visibility in the Google search index, and try out the tips our Search Quality Evaluators have provided. Once you've built up organic traffic to your site, use Website Optimizer to understand how users interact with your pages and make improvements to your layout. And of course, during all of this, experiment with AdSense optimization tips to learn which colors, formats, and placements monetize best on your site.Finally, as we blogged about during this Newbie Fridays series, your earnings potential can go up as advertisers find that you're sending high-quality leads to their sites. This won't happen overnight, but with patience and hard work you can watch your efforts convert into a high-quality site and higher AdSense earnings. And you won't even need a hundred sites to do it :)Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Today at Open Hack 2008, we'll be announcing a new developer challenge we're hosting with Mashable. Since Yahoo! Search BOSS is all about openness and innovation, we figured the BOSS Mashable Challenge should be too; so there are almost no restrictions on what you can submit. Have an idea for a better way to search on the iPhone? Always wanted a search engine to help you find info on your hobby? Think you could design a better UI than 10 blue links? Now is your chance to build a mashup or prototype, win some cash and show the world your hack. As long as you use a BOSS API and submit it to the Challenge, your idea can win. The Challenge starts today and the deadline for submission is September 28. Mashable and Yahoo! will then pick the top submission and open it up to Mashable readers for voting. The winner will receive $2000, a nod on Mashable and loads of street (or geek) cred. Those of you who've already built mashups using BOSS are of course eligible as well. Just make sure to submit it to the Challenge. And if you're coming to Open Hack 2008, don't forget to stop by the BOSS session at 3:00 this afternoon. Graham Mudd BOSS Team

This Saturday, September 13, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. As is typical during these maintenance periods, you won't be able to log in during these hours, but your earnings will continue to accrue and ads continue to be displayed on your pages.For those of you located in different time zones, we've provided the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world. Montreal - 1pm SaturdayMilan - 7pm SaturdayMoscow - 9pm SaturdayMumbai - 10:30pm SaturdayManila - 1am SundayPosted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Following our announcement a few weeks ago, we're happy to announce that Western Union is now offered as a payment method for publishers located in Panama. To sign up for payments by Western Union, sign in to your account and follow these instructions. Please also keep in mind that we're only able to make Western Union payments to individual payee names, but not to businesses.Not located in Panama? We've been reading your comments on our other recent payment-related posts, and understand that many of you are looking forward to new payment options in additional countries. Please know that we aren't able to provide details about when new options may become available, as setting them up can take time due to factors like compliance with local laws and tax regulations. However, we're working hard to find more convenient ways to send you your earnings, and we'll definitely announce any new options here. In the meantime, please feel free to keep leaving your feedback, and we appreciate your patience!Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

We'll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and 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. To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board. Sharad Verma Yahoo! Search

AdSense publisher Next Small Things has long understood that search is the entry point for users to find what they're looking for on the web. In fact, the idea for CoolChaser.com, a MySpace layout creation and customization site (and Next Small Things's largest business to date), came from the observation that many web surfers were using the company's search engine to find instructions to change their MySpace backgrounds. The observation and ensuing business idea has paid off, and in just one year CoolChaser.com has gained a loyal user base: over 200,000 users are now finding or creating layouts on the site every day. "CoolChaser has become a one-stop-shop for layouts because of the ease of use and the choice and ability for users to express what they feel at the time," says founder Chao Lam. With over 20 million user-submitted layouts (and 3,000 created every hour), it was becoming increasingly difficult for users to find the layouts they were looking for. "We were getting a lot of requests from users to provide some sort of search mechanism so that they could easily find what they were looking for," developer Sachiko Kwan says. As an existing AdSense publisher, Kwan decided to try AdSense for search and was immediately impressed by the quick setup process and the accuracy of the results. With the new SiteSearch feature, Kwan was able to restrict the searches so users didn't have to leave the site to find what they were looking for. In addition, the new watermark feature allowed Kwan to add the search box without any rearrangement in the navigation bar.Most recently, Lam and Kwan began optimizing their search for better performance and user experience. If a user wasn't creating a layout, they were looking for one. So Kwan moved the search box from the upper right corner of each page to the center of the header and also added a second search box to the bottom of every page, in case users who were done browsing needed to search again. On the search results page, she changed the ad borders to a lighter color to better blend in with the site's pages.Within a week of making these changes, Lam and Kwan saw their daily search queries on CoolChaser increase by 40% and earnings more than double. Since implementing AdSense for search on CoolChaser, search has become the second most popular functionality behind creating layouts. Lam and Kwan continue to focus on user experience, and they are now working to refine search results using keywords and labels. "There's such an enormous variety of things people search for," Lam says. "AdSense for search is really working for us."Have you had success with AdSense for search, or our new optimization tips? If so, we'd love to hear from you.Posted by Sandra Tsui - AdSense Publisher Support

Our team at Yahoo! Search has been speaking at various shows about SearchMonkey, Yahoo!'s new developer platform that uses data web standards and structured data to enhance the usefulness of search results. If you're interested in getting the details of those talks, take a look at some of our presentations featured on SlideShare.net. In addition to the presentations produced and uploaded by Yahoo!, other presentations from our SearchMonkey community have been posted as well. If you have a SearchMonkey tutorial or presentation that you'd like to share, you can add it to SlideShare as well. Just mark your presentation with the "searchmonkey" tag and you'll automatically be included in the SearchMonkey repository: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/searchmonkey. Yahoo! Search Blog team

Our team at Yahoo! Search has been speaking at various shows about SearchMonkey, Yahoo!'s new developer platform that uses data web standards and structured data to enhance the usefulness of search results. If you're interested in getting the details of those talks, take a look at some of our presentations featured on SlideShare.net. The folks over there were kind enough to feature a handful of recent SearchMonkey presentations on their homepage. In addition to the presentations produced and uploaded by Yahoo!, other presentations from our SearchMonkey community have been posted as well. If you have a SearchMonkey tutorial or presentation that you'd like to share, SlideShare is a great place to do it. Just mark your presentation with the "searchmonkey" tag and you'll automatically be included in the SearchMonkey repository: http://www.slideshare.net/tag/searchmonkey. Yahoo! Search Blog team