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Google Checkout or “GBuy” as it has been referred to has finally launched. An online wallet service that Google is hoping will attract more advertisers by providing an easier check out process for their customers.
Google Checkout streamlines the buying process by storing a buyers billing, shipping and credit card information to enable fast, smooth checkouts.
AdWords advertisers that use Google Checkout will have a small shopping cart icon appear in their ads that Google hopes to turn into a symbol of trust with online consumers.
AdWords advertisers can save on some of the processing fees, currently 2% plus 20 cents per transaction. For every $1 spent on advertising, they’ll receive $10.00 worth of transaction processing for free. Someone else noted that it’s like getting a 20% discount on your advertising.
Merchants do not need to have a shopping cart to sell single items on their web site. By simply adding a Buy Now button, buyers are taken directly to Google Checkout to complete their purchase.
Check Out buttons allow merchants to sell multiple items to buyers by integrating their web site with one of Google’s ecommerce partners or via Google Checkout API.
Demos are provided for merchants and shoppers, and more information can be found at http://checkout.google.com or in Google’s Blog. Merchant sign up and approval took us less than 5 minutes.
Google has secured yet another toolbar agreement, this time with Adobe Systems, Inc. The agreement to bundle Google’s Toolbar with Adobe’s Shockwave Player downloads was announced this past Wednesday.
The Google Toolbar will be offered as part of the Macromedia Shockwave Player installation process for Internet Explorer. It was also noted that under the terms of the agreement, the toolbar would also be offered as part of other Adobe product installations in the future.
Google is thought to be securing these deals as far in advance of the anticipated release of Window’s Vista OS in order to gain further access to the consumer base by adding their search box to the web browser. Vista will offer Microsoft’s own search system as the default setting in an attempt to gain market share.
Adobe’s Shockwave player has been downloaded a reported 200 million times, which places it on an estimated 55% of internet ready desktop computers.
Like their earlier toolbar deal with Dell, none of the financial terms of the agreement were released.
Adobe Signs Multi-Year Distribution Agreement with Google
Adobe and Google team up for Toolbar
We’ve been watching how a Blogger flaw is being exploited and wondering how quickly Google will realize and react to this problem.
The problem is that whenever a blogspot subdomain is transferred (to another blogspot subdomain) or exported to another domain, the transferred blogspot subdomain is immediately released and available to anyone with a Blogger account.
Many of these subdomains have large numbers of backlinks that may never get updated, providing the opportunistic with instant PageRank and traffic (human and bots). Google search results provide a regularly updated list of the available subdomains if you know which search terms to use.
Someone creative has grabbed these available subdomains and created what appears to be regular 404 error pages like one you would normally see if you visited a blog that had moved.
The difference is that these faked error pages are loaded with hundreds of hidden links to subdomains that have been flooding Google’s search results.
If you’d like to see what this guy’s been up to - view the source code of the 404 error pages listed in the above search results.
Related:
New SPAM sites…billions of results!!!!
How to Get 5 Billion Pages Indexed in Less Than 30 Days
Google has long been the preferred search engine and has slightly widened it’s seemingly insurmountable lead over rivals Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN Search again.
In May, Google served up 59.3 percent of the search queries, followed by Yahoo in second with 22 percent, and MSN Search in third with just 12.1 percent.
Microsoft and Yahoo both have made large investments in development of their own search technology and still find themselves chasing Google which gained a 1 percent increase since March. MSN Search lost a point and Yahoo remained unchanged.
Search is still considered the largest revenue generating segment of the online market, acounting for almost 41 percent of revenues.
Online advertising increased 30 percent in 2005 to $12.5B, and is expected to continue its growth.
Remember when Google would proudly display the size of their index on the home page or publish a milestone when the index size increased?
It seems size no longer matters as they removed the statement from the home page back a short while back. Or maybe they realized that relevancy is what matters most.
The original concept of using rel=”nofollow” to combat blogspam or splogs was a good idea when originally proposed by Google.
This was to identify links that should not be counted as a vote or endorsement by the linking page. It’s interesting to note that it was originally designed to be utilized on pages where users or visitors could add links by themselves such as blog comments, guestbooks, visitors stats or referrer logs.
I’m seeing more and more comments on the expanding use of this attribute by some search engines, especially in relation to paid links or text ads placed on a site.
For instance, Matt Cutts suggests using rel=”nofollow” on paid links:
What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, I would use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.
On a site that we are associated with, the owners sell advertising to help offset some of their operating expenses. They offer several advertising options including button ads, text ads, individual topic sponsorship or for the most visibility they offer site sponsorship ads in either format.
The most popular ads by far are the text ads, which are placed on the bottom of the page where a reader might want to find related information from other web sites after reading an article.
The ads and web sites are reviewed prior to their acceptance and must meet certain guidelines. While the owners do not endorse any of the products or services advertised, they do not use nofollow links for the most part as they are completely unaware of this tag or it’s intentions.
I really hope that this doesn’t cause them any problems with “trust” in the future. We’ll have to wait and see.
I think the original intent of ”nofollow” was a good idea, but it’s sad to see that it’s been ineffective at stopping blog spam. It’s now referred to as Google’s embarrasing mistake.
I’m encouraged by Jeremy Zawodny’s blog post Nofollow No Good?
Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit. Life’s too short for that, ya know? Link and be linked to. Let the search engines sort it out.