Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 7/30 – 8/3

A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including MediaWhiz fully acquires AuctionAds, Google AdWords launches Campaign Optimizer tool, Google will no longer label results from the supplemental index even though the index will remain intact, Rand Fishkin poses ten questions every SEO form should be able to answer before charging for services, and finally Google advertisers will soon have a choice as to whether their ads run on parked domains or not.

Monday

• MediaWhiz Acquires AuctionAds – MediaWhiz, the company that recently acquired Text Link Ads has now bought AuctionAds for an undisclosed amount. Actually Jeremy Schoemaker’s Shoemoney Media launched AuctionAds in partnership with MediaWhiz back in March. Therefore MediaWhiz is buying Jeremy’s majority ownership in order to full own the company. AuctionAds is an advertising widget that serves contextually relevant eBay auctions based on tags supplied by the publisher. Since launch, they have registered over 20,000 publishers on their network, myself included. More details at TechCrunch and Shoemoney’s Blog.

Tuesday

• AdWords Launches Campaign Optimizer - The Inside AdWords blog announced the launch of Campaign Optimizer, an on-demand AdWords tool that provides personalized campaign ideas in just minutes. The tool first analyzes your campaign to see what settings have or haven’t worked well for you recently. It then generates a customized proposal of ideas for your campaign aimed at improving your performance. You’ll be able to apply the ones you like directly to your campaign. Some of the items this new tool might suggest include changing your daily budget, adding new or additional keywords, changing keyword matching options, adjusting keyword maximum cost-per-click bid and changing ad text.

Wednesday

• Google Dumps Supplemental Index Labeling But Not Index Itself - Danny Sullivan has an in-depth write-up on Google getting rid of the “Supplemental Index” label that would attach itself to any web page that was in the supplemental index. That does not mean that the index has disappeared or that pages will still not find their way in there. However, Google assures us that by the end of summer there should be less difference between the supplemental index and the main one. They are promising that every query should hit both indexes at the same time, so that a page in supplemental should have a better chance of ranking than in the past. Oh, and just in case you are unfamiliar with what the supplemental index actually is, it was created back in September 2003 as a way for Google to index more pages from the web but not get bogged down actually searching through those billions and billions of them unless absolutely necessary.

Thursday

• Ten Questions Every SEO Firm Should Be Able To Answer - Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz put together a list of ten questions every SEO firm should b able to answer before selling services. Sadly, Rand believes that less than 30% of companies that spend money on organic search ranking services are getting a good deal due to fact that many firms offering such services are novice in their understanding of SEO. He follows up the initial post with his answers however before you look at the answers, I’d challenge you to take the quiz and learn the depth of your SEO knowledge.

Friday

• AdSense For Domains Will Soon Offer a Choice - You mean AdWords advertisers currently do not have a choice? And what is AdSense for Domains anyway? First of all, AdSense for Domains, also known as DomainPark, is a product where Google places ads from AdWords campaigns on parked domains and match the relevancy of those ads based on the words found in the domain name of the site. Advertisers may assume that if they opt out of contextual advertising that they have also automatically opted out of DomainPark but that is not so. So long as they have selected targeting for Google’s “search network” their ads could show up on parked domains. However Google ha recently been quoted as saying, “We are working on making it simpler for advertisers who don’t want to show on domain sites or error pages to exclude them.” There you have it. When it will happen has not been stated but they are working on it. More at Search Engine Land.