And that was search marketing in 2008….
Ξ December 24th, 2008 | → | ∇ Search Engines, News, SEO, SEMPO, Yahoo, Industry, Google, Microsoft, Paid Search |
It’s a bit like dog years. Every year in search marketing feels like 7 because so much changes so quickly, and 2008 has been no exception. I wanted to close off 2008 by running through some of the key UK search news of 2008.
Trademark wars
In May, Google updated its UK trademark policy to put it closer in line with the US market, effectively allowing advertisers to bid on any term (even “Google”) but still restricting the use of trademarked terms in ad creative. While the initial change brought much uproar, the subsequent impact on CPCs was limited thanks to the Quality Score rendering a lot of search ads irrelevant.
Left standing at the altar
After many “Will they? Won’t they?” moments Microsoft finally walked away from an acquisition of Yahoo in May of this year. There are still rumours of further partnership opportunities between the two companies but Steve Ballmer has been very clear that an acquisition is now firmly “off the table”.
Any bets?
Hot on the heels of a disappointing Q3 earnings call, Google relaxed its UK restrictions on gambling ads with such short notice that many gambling companies were forced to simply re-allocate budgets from Yahoo and Microsoft Adcenter in the short-term. In 2009 it’s been predicted that this could grow to be one of the largest categories for search advertising.
More support for SEOers
This year, both Google and Microsoft increased their support for the SEO community with improvements to webmaster central and an abundance of best practice guides and tips. One of the most topical at the time was Google’s commentary on dynamic vs. static URLs.
Quality, Quality, Quality
2008 saw a myriad of changes to Google’s quality score, including:
· Factors influencing the quality score were increased to include the load time of landing pages.
· The calculation of quality score became real-time and more transparency was provided on a scale of 1 to 10 and an indication of the cost of a “First Page Bid”.
· CTR was “normalized” to reflect an ads position on the page and higher relevance made a top sponsored listing more achievable -
Ring my bell
The 1st December was a momentous day for SEMPO when a delegation of members rang the bell at NASDAQ and launched this 5th annual “State of the Market” survey for search marketing. To complete the survey head over to the SEMPO website.
Will 2009 see as much change as this year? Paul Doleman will be posting his thoughts on that in the near year so be sure to look back after your Christmas break.
Merry Xmas from SEMPO UK
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