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Google is now offering AdSense for Feeds, after announcing that Feedburner would not be accepting any more applications to the Feedburner Ad Network.

No official announcement has been made, but many publishers are able to access the feature in their AdSense accounts. I was able to do so with mine. Below is a screenshot of the process for signing up a feed:

via Google Operating System

Related Reading:
Google Gives Away FeedBurner Services
Will Google’s FeedBurner Scorch Organic SEO?

We often take the mainstream press to task for not understanding the value of search engine marketing and search engine optimization. So it’s a welcome change when a national columnist gets it right.

Today Steven Strauss in TheStreet.com wrote a column titled, “Get on Google’s Good Side with SEO.” With Matt Cutts’ recent endorsement of “white hat” SEO, it’s great to see small business embrace search engine optimization.

Strauss writes, “One of the questions I hear most often these days goes something like, ‘How the heck am I supposed to keep my small business going in this economy? I don’t have a lot of money for advertising.’”

He states - or perhaps overstates:

The good news is that there is in fact a great way to market your business that is not expensive and is very effective. However, it is quite time-consuming.

It’s called search engine optimization. SEO gets you noticed, is practically free marketing and increases sales. SEO is the magic bullet.

Anyone who’s done SEO knows it’s not a magic bullet. Calling SEO a magic bullet beats “snake oil” any day of the week.

Since he’s writing for beginners, Strauss compares fear of SEO to an Alec Baldwin-Anthony Hopkins movie written by David Mamet, “The Edge.”

I am reminded of the 1997 movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. In it, the two men are stranded in the Alaska Outback after their small plane crashes.

Soon they are being stalked by a bear. Eventually Hopkins’ character convinces himself and Baldwin’s character, Bob, that they can slay the bear.

“I’m going to kill the bear,” Hopkins’ character says, “Say it! Say I’m going to kill the bear!”

Bob says it, halfheartedly.

Charles (Hopkins) then yells at Bob: “Say it! Say I’m going to kill the bear!” Bob says it.

“Say it again,” says Charles. Bob, starting to feel it, says it more loudly. “I’m going to kill the bear.” “Again!” Charles bellows. Finally, Bob yells, convincingly, ” I Am Going To Kill The Bear!”

Finally, they kill the bear.

You must believe in SEO and your ability to achieve online marketing goals to succeed.

Steven D. Strauss is a lawyer, author and USA TODAY columnist. His latest book is the Small Business Bible. He’s spoken around the world about entrepreneurship, including at the UN, and has been seen on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, The O’Reilly Factor, and many other television and radio shows. He maintains a Web site at www.MrAllBiz.com.

The ’state-of-the art’ day care facilities at Google have increased their pricing to around what it costs to go to some community colleges, according to the New York Times. While the free food, refreshments and candy, once looked upon as a great perk by many outsiders considering a Google job, now seem to be considered pampering by co-founder Sergey Brin, NYT reports.

Though a Google spokesperson denied it, several people who attended a T.G.I.F. meeting in June claim Brin said “he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” NYT stated.

Hey Sergey, you keep these people at their desks longer - or is it productivity or new thoughts outside the box are not coming as rapidly as in the past? Maybe the $72 million a year spent on food is cutting into Sergey’s private income, and he does not want child care to take even more.

Given stock prices are a long way from the $700 highs of last year, it should now not fall on the non-millionaire employees to make up the short fall.

Seems to me this approach is a lot like the minimum bid increases that saw the regular advertiser pay for Google’s efforts to stop arbitragers - they were so profitable Google continued this with implementation of Quality Scores to keep minimum bids and have all new advertisers pay premiums starting out their accounts.

Working at Google was once almost an extension of living with your parents, but now it seems dad is starting to charge rent.

Google has announced their replacement of outgoing CFO George Reyes. Former Bell Canada CFO Patrick Pichette has been offered the position along with an employment package as good as many first round draft picks in sports.

As the San Jose Mercury News details, Pichette will get a $500,000 signing bonus and the rest of the package makes his first year’s pay in the millions.

Welcome to the team Patrick.

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Understanding search engines and natural search may be the most important skill of the 21st century. At the very least, search engine knowledge will save you from an embarrassing faux pas.

For example, Felix Salmon of Conde Nast Portfolio posted this morning on “Google’s Top 10 Universities.” The only problem? He doesn’t understand how the Google search engine works.

Vanity Fair quotes Google’s Larry Page on the logic behind the Google search engine: “Even in the very early days when we were at Stanford, you could type “university” into Google, and you actually got the top 10 universities. I think that basic notion really helped us a lot.”

In Porfolio.com, a sister company of Vanity Fair, Salmon blogged about the VF article and conducted the Page search on his own:

“So, of course, I typed “university” into Google, wondering where Stanford would come up. And the answer is: 12th. On the first page, the Wikipedia page for “university” comes top; the rest of the page is five UK universities (Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Warwick, and Durham); two Canadians (Toronto and Queen’s); and two Australians (Monash and Sydney). Not necessarily most people’s idea of the top 10 univeristies, but an interesting list all the same.

Of course it’s not everyone’s idea of the top 10 universities because Salmon was based in the UK. Google still thinks he is. Or perhaps, he did the search from the UK. Based on the early posting hour, that’s a good possibility.

Salmon’s bio:

Felix Salmon arrived in the United States in 1997 from England, where he worked at Euromoney magazine. He also wrote daily commentary on Latin American markets for the former news service Bridge News, freelanced for a variety of publications, helped set up the New York bureau of a financial website, and created the Economonitor blog for Roubini Global Economics. He has been blogging since 1999.

Salmon is a graduate of the University of Glasgow.

The team at Live Search as announced the addition of a deep links feature to its search results. Similar to Google’s Sitelinks, the feature lists prominent internal links for the #1 result on certain searches.

I did a comparison of this feature for both Live Search and Yahoo. My first search is for the “State Department.”

As you can see, Live Search lists the deep links in a single column, indented underneath the home page of the State Department’s website.

While Google lists more results in 2 columns, and offers a search within a search box underneath the Sitelinks.

Next, I did a search for Starbucks. Live Search listed a paid search link, followed by local listings and then served up the first organic results with deep links. It’s pretty far down on the page, especially since the closest Starbucks to me is not one of the three local listings provided by Live Search. Also, it provides Related Searches on the Sidebar, one of which is a search for a link provided in the deep links.

Google had a much more simple results page for Starbucks. The paid search ads are only on the sidebar and you get to the corporate Starbucks website right away.

For the most part, Google seems to turn up more Sitelinks than Live Search. Also, Google provides Sitelinks for sites that Live Search doesn’t. Searches for both “Search Engine Watch” and “Nike” both returned Sitelinks in Google but no deep links in Live Search.

Related Reading:
Google Sitelinks: New Name For Those Links Under The Top Listings
Google Revamps Sitelinks

The value of Google’s stock has taken a bit of a beating recently from their high of $747 last year to yesterday’s close at $438. After doing my weekly news review, I saw a lot of articles questioning many actions Google has been doing lately.

Is this pervasive critiquing of Google having an impact of investors’ confidence?

The articles I read this week came from a wide range of sources - not just limited to the search industry specific ones we all know within the industry. (I was at a offline/online media event on Thursday where the majority had not heard of SEW, AussieWebmaster or for that matter Danny Sullivan!)

The firing of people from DoubleClick supposedly slated for April 1, according to ValleyWag, should show investors that they are lowering expenses and thus increasing profits for them. But the general public usually sees the company laying people off after an acquisition as Gordon Gekkoish. The eventual impact should be seen in the coming week as this actually happens.

I was having dinner one night during SES NYC last week, I noticed a friend there who does angel investing and asked him what Google closed at that day to determine who in my party was paying. He knew to the penny as he told me he was shorting Google (now I know where he gets his seed capital).

Then I see an article this morning from the UK Guardian stating Google’s PPC numbers were slowing. Given January had shown zero growth and February’s growth was low single digits compared to previous growth being as high as 30-40%, this spending and growth wall could be a major hurdle for the company’s valuation.

“Google maintains that the deceleration is a consequence of its strategy of focusing on quality. The Silicon Valley firm has been trying to eliminate accidental clicks and has been working with advertisers to make sure that links relate closely to users’ search queries.

But the slowdown has contributed to a 36% slump in Google’s shares since the beginning of the year and analysts are divided on whether the company’s confidence is justified,” the Guardian stated.

This is also challenged a little by recent complaints by advertisers over some of these methods of improving the quality. The $10 Minimum Bid push has lost Google advertisers. The arbitragers squeezing a few pennies from a click have had to drop away (leaving the really good ones at it a cheaper range), but so have the companies that provide legitimate inexpensive products or services very relevant to the people searching from that perspective.

The impact Google is having on other online industries may also be impacting their brand and through that their value. The analytics industry was impacted by Google’s purchase of Urchin and the development of the free services of Google Analytics - so even a popular free service gets flak, and their mistakes are made public quickly as was the case with GA information being displayed in the Google organic results..

There will be an additional backlash from the DoubleClick acquisition. It is going to be hard for the soon to be unemployed to find jobs in the industry as Google launched Ad Manager which offers ad serving for free and thus will hurt the job market in the industry as the competitors lose market share.

The words of Larry Page’s recent Annual Report letter reflect the perspective the founder sees his realm of “users, customers, Googlers (our employees), and investors who help bring everything that is Google to life”.

Part of Google’s success has been in its ability to maintain the “church and state” separation of organic listings and paid search ads. While that is to be commended, isolating customers from the users pool is a little naive - people advertise on Google because they have used Google and want to advertise to similar users.

Google would not still be in business if they had not been able to monetize the popular search engine. When they first started the company was nearly sold to Excite.com for a million dollars, because they could not monetize what they were doing.

With revenues of more than $10 billion last year - 90% of which came from paid search advertising - you would think the customers would take top billing, but the behemoth of search still sees search through the eyes of its users.

” We continue our effort to extract more and more real meaning from the web in order to help people find the right answers. We recently improved universal search, integrating different types of relevant information, such as video, maps, news, books, images, and more, right into your search results.

Sometimes you don’t get a good answer to a search because the information simply isn’t available on the web. So we are working hard to encourage ecosystems that can generate more content from more authors and creators. For example, we recently announced an early version of a tool called “knol” to help people generate and organize more high-quality authored content.”

Watch out Wikipedia your space is soon to be seriously invaded.

And one has to wonder if Google is getting into the conference and hotel business next. Their proposal to develop a parcel of land in the Mountain View industrial park for office space, conference center and a hotel is lodged with the local council.

Wonder if they plan on starting their own search conferences, with attendees staying at the nearby hotel? Are we to see a conference advertising tab soon in our AdWords accounts?

Click to read the rest of this post…

If you look carefully in your next Google search, you might just see a video ad included in the sponsored listings along side your organic results. It’s not obvious at first. You have to look for a version of the PlusBox, used for things like local search results and video in the organic listings, in the ads column.

In February, word came that Google was testing video ads, and searchers began noticing the ads on live searches this morning.

I did a search today for [smart phone] (since [smartphone] didn’t return a video), and found an ad with an invitation to “Watch Commercial” under it:

When you click on the plus sign, the listing expands to display a video right there in the results. You also may need your grandmother’s magnifying glass as the video ads are tiny! They’re just 160×140 pixels, including the player navigation.

So far, it looks like only searches for “tech” terms like laptop or cell phone will trigger a video ad. Searches for cat food, personal finance, and luggage did not return any video ad results.

It’s Day 2 at SES New York 2008 and the folks from Pan Communications have found nearly 70 stories that have been written about the Search Engine Strategies conference. If you want a comprehensive list, Matt McGowan, the Global Vice President of Marketing for Incisive Media, will be posting one later this evening on the Search Engine Strategies Blog.

In the meantime, I’ve looked through the news articles and blog posts from Tuesday, March 18, 2008, to try to identify the top ten stories on Day 2 of the event. With five concurrent sessions, no one individual can see everything. So, even those of us who are at SES New York this week are relying on the news and blog coverage (as well as word-of-mouth) to keep up with all the latest developments from the event. (Trade shows and conferences are an off-line form of social media.)

1. Carr: Google Offers ‘Animal Sacrifices’ in Datacenters
Clint Boulton of eWeek’s Google Watch says, “Nicholas Carr discussed the past, present and future of computing during a keynote at the Search Engine Strategies 2008 show in New York this morning.” He adds, “Carr covered so much ground in the 60 minutes, touching on everything from the first water wheel used to generate electricity, to mainframes, to cloud computing and Google’s datacenters and the future of distributed applications and search engines strategies.”

2. Nick Carr Keynote
You can listen to Nick Carr’s opening keynote at SES New York on WebmasterRadio.FM. Nick discusses how computer systems and software algorithms are at the center of business today, and the implications for privacy.

3. Nick Carr at SES NY 2008 on The Big Switch

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner of Beyond Ink, interviews Nick Carr, the opening keynote speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City and the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the Word, from Edison to Google. Nick gives a recap on his New York keynote speech about Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo, net neutrality, and the implications on human thinking.

4. YouTube: Damon Wayans Pay-to-Play, Paid Inclusion or Pay-for-Placement?
Kevin Heisler of Search Engine Watch says, “At SES NY, John Battelle outted Damon Wayans, Google and YouTube. Battelle said Wayans spilled the beans on his YouTube deal as a “platinum partner” for WayOutTV.com. Wayans shared he was guaranteed 6 million impressions by YouTube. Those 6 million impressions — guaranteed — sounds very much like the structure of a MySpace-style minimum revenue deal. Plus, Wayans shared his YouTube rev share number. Wow.”

5. hakia licenses OntoSem technology to third parties
Paul Miller of ZDNet’s The Semantic Web says, “New York-based semantic search company hakia will today use the Search Engine Strategies Conference to announce that their Ontological Semantic technology, OntoSem, is available for licensing. Illinois-based RiverGlass, Inc. is the first licensee, and will work to enhance their existing real-time analytics solutions with OntoSem.”

6. SES New York: Converting Visitors into Buyers
Jolina Pettice of the Online Marketing Blog says, The conversions track at SES New York continues to be packed with those wanting to increase the performance of their search marketing campaigns.”

7. The Long Tail Not Always Good, If Quality Score is Your Thing
Andrew Goodman of Traffick says, “I had the pleasure of moderating the panel on Ads in a Quality Score World at SES New York today. Along with two advertiser-side speakers (Joel Lapp and Jon Kelly), Frederick Vallaeys of Google and David Miller of Yahoo weighed in.”

8. Earning Money from Contextual Ads
Tamar Weinberg of Search Engine Roundtable says, “This session looks at the way publishers can generate revenue by carrying contextual ads offered by major networks. Learn about some programs out there and tips on getting more from the ads you carry.”

9. SES New York: Live Search “Tips And Tricks”
By Doug Caverly of WebProNews says, “Although people sometimes forget this fact, there are search engines outside of Google. At SES New York, two Microsoft managers walked an audience through ways to do well with Live Search.”

10. SES New York Day 2 … Start Your Engines!
Jeff Quipp of the aimClear Blog says, “Day 1 of Search Engine Strategies New York certainly lived up to expectations. The sessions were excellent, the city is spectacular, and I was fortunate enough to meet up with a large number of new and old friends. The day ended for most with a St. Paddy’s day pub crawl, primarily through Irish bars :).” He adds, “Day 2 is shaping up to be equally exciting. I’m personally live blogging some of the Local search sessions, which I’m really looking forward to.”