In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for August 9, 2007:

Yahoo! News From Various Sources

Yahoo! made a couple of announcements worth mentioning today (or yesterday while I was away from the computer). First, a new Traffic Quality Center was launched. This is basically an educational website that helps webmasters understand click fraud (and what Yahoo! is doing about it). Yahoo! has published tips, best practices, news updates, and instructions on dealing with and reporting click fraud. Second, the SERPs from Sunnyvale have a new shortcut - baseball player stats. Search out a specific player and Yahoo! will present you with a nifty box full of stats (both real and fantasy), links, and a mug shot. They also plan to roll out other sports as their seasons start.

Google News From Various Sources

Not to be outdone by Yahoo!, Google made a few announcements of its own today. The biggest of those probably has to do with the way the company will be choosing which sponsored results end up at the top of the SERPs. Previously the ads Quality Score and actual CPC were the determining factors for the top spot. The company is changing the way the Quality Score is weighed and - more importantly - dropping the actual CPC from the decision. Instead, the maximum CPC will be used instead. What does this mean? The general consensus is that big ad spenders will begin pushing the smaller folks out (because they can set higher maximum CPCs) - and that quality will suffer. Oh yeah… great move. Speaking of spending money, the Google Checkout Blog also announced that several online merchants would be offering back-to-school savings of up to $20 for using Google Checkout. Hmm… didn’t they already try this at least once? Finally, Google officially commented on a fact a lot of us have known about for some time - Googlebot is a much busier beaver these days. The Official Google Blog points out that pages are getting indexed so quickly that “last visited” times for many sites will switch from date view (Aug 8, 2007) to time view (33 minutes ago). Searchers will now be able to pick the freshest results that Google has to offer from their SERPs.

Have a great night everyone!