SMX Advanced, Who’s Going?

I’ll be attending SMX Advanced in Seattle this year. Who else is going?

Yahoo Updates Crawler to Slurp 3.0

Search Engine Journal has a great post on the updated Yahoo! crawler. The meaty part of the post says:

First, Slurp 3.0 will start crawling from smaller set of IP addresses, although still within crawl.yahoo.net.domain. Reverse DNS checks will still continue working. For webmasters who use IP-based recognition for identifying Yahoo crawlers, Yahoo advises to move to reverse DNS-based identification of Yahoo! Slurp to avoid getting dropped by the Yahoo Slurp 3.0 crawlers.

Second, Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 will now publish a new user-agent – “Yahoo!Slurp 3.0”. Although existing robots.txt directives for “Slurp” or “Yahoo! Slurp” will continue working, directives for “Slurp 2.0” would not work anymore. So, Yahoo suggests that webmasters use the shorter version of the User-agent which is simply – Slurp.

Yahoo to Update Quality Score

Effective next week, Yahoo’s quality score will change. Marketing Pilgrim says,

automatic 10¢ minimum bid will be discontinued. Minimum bids will vary rather than be set. Instead higher quality ads will start paying less per click. If your ad is low quality your minimum bid will be higher. So you can’t buy your way to the top, you have to earn it - with clicks and a valuable landing page.

Goodbye MacBook, Hello MacBook Pro

Yesterday we upgraded our somewhat sluggish MacBooks for new MacBook Pros with 4 GB of memory and Leopard.  I absolutely love Apple stores; the checkout was literally less than 5 minutes and was all done wirelessly via handheld device.  Little things, like not having to stand in line to check out, is what separates Apple from the rest.

Google Selling Performics Search Marketing

In short, Google has separated search and affiliate marketing and will be selling the search marketing portion to maintain objectivity.

From the blog post:

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.