The past week has been associated with certain searches on Google Adwords ads have seen in a slightly different format than before. Google keeps namely on and test the ads with a longer ad headlines. In practice this means that you have joined the previous ad title with the first line of text and separated them with a hyphen. See the difference in the pictures below:

The new format will only appear to the selected ads in the top 3-point, and only go where the first line of text ends with a period, question mark or exclamation point. Do you have more chance to show their ad in this way, one should look to form their ads in this way.

The purpose of this change is in accordance with Google to allow advertisers to get more important information where it is most visible, namely the title link, and to increase CTR. The CTR will increase seems unlikely, partly because the ads are more visible and partly because they become more like the organic matches - where a very large part of the clique ports today. This is of course in Google's interest as more ad clicks also directly lead to more money for Google, as opposed to click on organic results.

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I'm sure everyone has seen the various ads for questionable products showing up in the Google Adwords. In a recent post to Google's Public Policy Blog on handling counterfeit ads, Google talks about some new changes and how they will be dealing with them in 2011

The blog is filled with interesting figures, such as AdWords is host to some "one million advertisers in 190 countries". It also stated that the last quarter of 2010 they "shut down" 50,000 AdWords accounts sporting advertisements for counterfeit goods.

We all know that no system is flawless and the Google team seems to have their hands full handling these types of accounts. However they have stated that they were ramping up their efforts by making the following changes:

Respond to Counterfeit Complaints within 24 Hours: Introduced in 2009, Google created a complaint form users could fill out to report phony products being pushed in AdWords. They said that moving forward, response time is going to average 24 hours or less

New Help Center Page: They have created a new help center page where you can report counterfeiters. They are hoping this will make it easier for clients to actually report fraud when they find it.

Improving AdSense Anti-Counterfeit Reviews: Another step the company is making is to improve upon existing policies for reviewing product ads. Google  promises they will work "more closely with brand owners to identify infringers" and extricate them from AdSense.

So if you are one of those sites being affected by this change then you will need to find a new way to market your product since Google Adwords is now not a viable solution! Even Pay per Click Management by a reputable SEO company won't help with getting past Google defenses. 

It seems that Google's Sponsored Links are now being called Google Ads. At this time the roll out is only affecting English language domains and it is unclear when it will move to other languages.

Here is how they looked before:

How they appear now:

This will not alter the way the ads are displayed or selected but it is quite interesting as to why they made the change since the term "Sponsored Links" has been used for so long now.

The addition of Google Places and various local ads may be a contributing factor to the demise of the “Sponsored Links” term. Another reason may be that Google found that the term “Ads” performed better.

Bing named their ads “Sponsored Sites” and Yahoo “Sponsored Results” so perhaps Google is trying to set themselves apart from the pack once again by this renaming of "Sponsored Links" to "Ads".

If you spend any time researching SEO, you’ll quickly find that organic search engine optimization is the best way to go. There are dozens of other methods that can be used to boost your traffic quickly and while some are legit, such as Pay Per Click management, nothing beats real SEO, with strategically placed keywords and links for boosting your website. But why is that?

The entire purpose of search engines is to provide useful information to the searcher. Since search engines aren’t human, there are algorithms that determine what is useful or not. The best sites get moved to the top of the stack. This isn’t always true, of course, since people figure out how to trick the search engines. Google, Yahoo! and Bing are all on the lookout for this, however, and are constantly changing things up to ensure that only the best and most useful websites rise to the top.

While no one can ever know for sure just how the search engines work, we do know that getting backlinks is very valuable because it helps to determine if a site is worthy of attention or not. Organic search engine techniques like article writing can be quite useful for getting those backlinks build up.

If you are going to outsource, make sure you look for a company that will use "white hat" organic search engine optimization, as opposed to less acceptable methods. They should work on your website to get it into the search engine results. It’s an ongoing process and can take time. Rarely do these things happen overnight, but with careful planning and execution, your business site can be the first thing people see when they search for your keywords.

Google has a beta version of a new keyword tool available in the AdWords console. To get to it( if you are currently using Adwords), login to adwords.google.com, go to a campaign, click on opportunities (if you have that tab), then on the left bar, click on keyword tool. A “beta” link should be available for you to click on in the top paragraph.

The keyword tool integrates some of the other tools that Google has been releasing. It links to the Google Insights for Search tool and it brings in data from industry segments. It also gives more advanced break down of filter options,  showing country specific data, mobile data, setting your own CPC prices, allows you to add keyword filters, you can even filter by industry category, break out by word and filter by match type. This tool seems quite interesting but only time will tell if this updated version will be as useful to Pay Per Click Management companies, organic search engine optimization firms and individual users.