There are so many times that I accept that you can slip in comment spam and it is often approved if it’s relevant enough. But a post on online appointment platforms has no relevance to the comment left by Search Engine Experts with the author name “SEO Company”. It’s also great to see other Melbourne marketers are reaching into the gutter to build shitty comment spam links after recent Penguin updates specifically seemed to focus on this type of parasitic link building.

What the hell would this comment do to benefit readers of this post, and how many parents honesty name their kids SEO Company…

So I can’t say I’ve seen a standalone offer for a while that was this cheap, so I advise head along and pick up a handful of cheap domains at this price.

I noticed today that on a limited number of specific search terms around webhosting that LiquidWeb are running the new Google Offers ad extensions. These ads appeared at the top in the yellow box but also at the right side as shown in the screenshot.

What is most disturbing about these “get offers” ads is that Google extracts your loggedin email address and adds it automatically into the first field. I can see the next stage when AdWords pre-populates both of these fields with your personal information based on your Google account details.

Nice clear sign that Google is concerned about user privacy and is so willing to share this data with publishers.

This year the opening keynote speaker is head of Google’s search ranking team Amit Singhal. Amit Google Fellow, and was recently elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Amit is certainly someone to listen to on his thoughts around what is happening in the industry and where Google sees digital marketing going in 2012.

SMX Conference Agenda

The first day’s agenda is split into a paid search/web analytics track and a n SEO focused advanced marketers track. The second day’s agenda is split out into SEO & social media track and the insightful advanced marketers track.

SMX Day One Agenda Covers

• Great Search Ads
• Google Analytics (not provided)
• Landing Page Conversions
• Regulated Global Marketing
• Search Personalisation
• Content Visibility via Schema.org
• Web Analytics

SMX Day Two Agenda Covers

• Mobile Search Trends
• Social Sharing Links
• Technical SEO Problems
• Social Media Power Tools
• SEO Power Tools
• Re-marketing & Re-targeting
• New Panda Content Rules
• Google+ify Or Die

International Search Summit

International Search Summit runs prior to SMX London on the 14th May and focuses on all the challenges, opportunities and issues with international search marketing. The one day conference is run to provide marketers indepth knowledge, solutions and techniques to grow your international audiences.

The ISS conference topics include:

• Zero Moment of Truth
• New Markup for Multiligual Content
• Search Plus Your World
• The Arabic Web (MENA Region)
• Catchup on Mobile
• Being Local when Global
• What’s New or Upcoming in International Search

Watch a video preview of what you can expect at SMX London

Register with Discount Code to Save £££
Register online here and save ££££ by using our discount code THELOSTAGENCY012

Purchase SMX London Passes
There are a number of different pass options at SMX London to suit everyone and every budget.

• SMX Conference Pass (2 day)
• One Day SMX Conference Pass
• International Search Summit Pass (14th May)
• SMX Bootcamp (14th May)
• Combination Pass (SMX/ISS)
• Combination Pass (SMX/Bootcamp)
• Two Day SMX Networking Pass
• One Day SMX Networking Pass

SMX London 2012 Venue & Accommodation
This years conference venue location is located at one of London’s most conference vanue Chelsea Football club. The conference venue is located just a few minutes away from Fulham Broadway Tube station and just 23.5 kilometres from Heathrow.

Chelsea Football Stadium offers onsite accommodation for conference attendees at Millennium & Copthorne Hotels At Chelsea Football Club. The 4 star Millennium Hotel offers both Junior & Luxury Suites for attendees but there are a number of alternative places to stay in the area.

4&5 Star Chelsea Hotel Deals
Best Chelsea Hotel Deals
Budget Rooms around Chelsea

The shutting down of this AdSense product has likely come at the request of the web spam team who fight daily to remove websites from their index that are of low value, but also from the industry who don’t like Google double dipping. Typically the benefit to users visiting any Adsense domains was close to zero but it also provided a strong commercial incentive for people to register typo domains and incentivize typosquatting domains.

This could certainly be a large step towards cleaning up the image of the domain parking industry as it shifts away from encouraging clicks to parked domains that add no value to working to develop the domains into lead generation and affiliate channels. There are a number of domain parking providers that run wonderful networks that help create content, provide analytics and generally help you build some value into your domains.  So it’s not the end of the world but there will be a number of unhappy domain owners that will have to start looking for a decent provide, but it will be golden days for domain parking platforms.

The announcement of shutting down its AdSense for Domain platform has potentially overnight destroyed a number of very profitable business models as I know a number of people who make great revenue from a handful of niche domains. But it will be interesting to see how this change will impact Google’s income stream over the next 6 months as people abandon it’s platform before it’s closed on June 27. It is also possible that a number of people might leave the domain parking industry so there could be a flood of domains that will start hitting the market over the next few months.

Based on this change I expect there is a significant Google algorithm change on the horizon that will potentially wipe out a number of these  sites, so Google wanted to get out while it was ahead. So stay tuned there is something on the horizon that pushed Google to respond after all these years of easy money.

Google is also being very fast in how quickly they started shutting down their parking program, with just a matter of a less than 2 months. They are also careful not to suggest any possible domain parking providers, they just advise people to Google “park my domains”. It’s a very interesting and lazy way to shut down a marketing platform and then just suggest people Google a certain phrase if they want to find a new parking provider. The official Google guide to migrating your domains away is here.

Doing a quick search across a few tools, currently there is no traffic around “park my domains” according to Google Trends, this is likely to change very quickly, and there is only 210 searches a month for that term as of today. As you can see from the screenshot below there is currently not that many specialist websites setup to capture that traffic but expect this to change rapidly.

Park My Domains

Google has tried to cut its ties with an industry it helped build and reward, but it will be an interesting few months on the AdSense support forums as domainers lash out that Google has cut off their revenue stream.  It is now a bigger incentive to build out domains into real businesses but is everyone ready for the sheer amount of work that is actually required?

For a number of people who did well out of AdSense for Domains it’s going to be interesting change to revenue streams as previously they could just buy niche domains park them with Google and operate on razor-thin margins across a massive portfolio of domains. This is a very interest move indeed. You can read more details on the Google help page.

In a move that might result in marketers having kittens and jumping from Rooftops has Google gone too far? In a sample query run today in a Chome “incognito” window I noticed that the results were a little different. There was 3 organic results and 7 Google places results. That’s right only 10 results with 30% being organic…

Update: I’ve seen it happen again this time with 6 places and 6 organic results.

6 Google Places and 6 Organic Results

Has Facebook started the process of rolling out an invite only program for a new type of ad that has a static “like” button similar to websites and no other ads showing at the same time.

“Over the next few months, Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format. When this group is archived, its wall posts, photos and discussion threads will move to the New groups format, but group members will need to be re-added.”

The point of concern is the part around group members will need to be re-added… why is Facebook making this so hard for those who have built up groups?

It seems that Pinterest is expanding their platform aggressively with partners like Etsy and offering price tags on some shared items, and is already one of the top 10 social networking sites according to VentureBeat attracting 11 million unique visitors in December.

It seems after a bit of testing back in September 2011, Amazon has finally started to roll out it’s refreshed interface started with Amazon Associates. You can see this new design if you are logged into your associates account but if you open a new chrome Incognito window you see the same old version.

I do really like the new look as it’s a welcome refresh and certainly seems to be designed to be used on touch screen devices and has been the first major change in a long term so should be welcomed by most of their users.

Google now shows at the bottom of the search result a message that these results include the word “store”. Show results that include only “shops”. It’s interesting that this same inclusion doesn’t happen if you search for “stores” or “store”, it only happens when you search for “shops”. This could be that Google is still struggling to link “Store” to the multiple Synonyms for “store” that could include: abundance, accumulation, backlog, cache, fount, fountain, fund, hoard, inventory, lode, lot, mine, nest egg, plenty, plethora, provision, quantity, reserve, reservoir, savings, spring, stock, stockpile, treasure, wares, wealth, well.

So Google is able to match a narrow synonym but not yet a broad synonym such as “store”.

The background on the song is that Barbie Girl is an interesting viral marketing campaign to promote the consumption of Lamb. The music clip has accepted the challenge of taking a really annoying song and make it even more annoying.

I must admit that the campaign does what it is created for…being terrible enough not to be taking seriously of offend consumers and bad enough that people are willing to share and discuss the video on social media. Sam Kekovich is focused on expanding his “Chop Culture” and the play on the Australian abbreviation for Barbarque “Barbie”…so throw another rack on the barbie…

Has YouTube rolled out another interface update already?