Nuggets From Our Internet Marketing “Industry Update” – Week 42

Yahoo! Reaches a Settlement in Class Action Lawsuit

The Pay-Per-Click class action lawsuit that was brought in 2006 by several search advertising customers of Yahoo! has been settled.  The lawsuit alleged that Yahoo! breached its contract with these customers by allowing ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites, pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites.  The plaintiffs’ claims included breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.

In the settlement, Yahoo! has agreed to develop a new ad placement option so that advertisers can control where their Yahoo! Ads appear.  It will allow them to specify that their Sponsored Search ads appear only on websites and other Internet properties owned or operated by Yahoo! and the websites of certain “Premium” distribution partners.  The Ad Placement Option will be available as early as the first quarter of 2010, and no later than September 30, 2010.  They also plan to post enhanced disclosures on the “Traffic Quality” section of their website regarding where Yahoo! Ads may appear on the Internet and modify their click investigation request tool.

Compete.com Enhancements

Compete.com is launching new features that will enhance and improve the way we do competitive analysis.  Here a few of the new and improved features:

The first feature is Compete’s new paid vs. natural keyword breakdowns.  This will allow users to find out how major competitors and best-in-class sites drive traffic with keywords that have the highest engagement.  Basically, you can run a search analytics report on your biggest competitor and use Compete’s new filters to find all the keywords they are bidding on.  It could take weeks or months to build out a list like this on your own.

Next is two years of trended historical search referral data.  This allows you to find out how search referrals change over time for a site and the composition of a site’s search traffic in terms of paid vs. organic search referrals.  This means you can now pinpoint where your company has a real opportunity to drive clicks, where the competition is getting the best clicks, and how seasonality impacts the industry.

Google Nixes PageRank from Webmaster Tools

Google has quietly removed the PageRank section in the crawl statistics in Google Webmaster Tools, stating “we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”  For SEO purposes, they feel that webmasters often obsess about the rank too much. When in reality, “PageRank” is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how a site is crawled, indexed and subsequently ranked in the actual SERPS. The common misconception is that PageRank accurately measures a website’s overall success status — when it does not.  At this point, however, Google still shows PageRank data in the Google Toolbar.

If you’re interested in learning more about what Rocket Clicks can do for your pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, website design and development, or law firm marketing, please check out our PPC services and SEO services or schedule a quick audit today. 

Sources:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/yahoo-reaches-settlement-in-pay-per-click-class-action-lawsuit
http://blog.compete.com/2009/10/12/compete-pro-upgrade-paid-natural-keyword-filter
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020960.html
http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq–crawling–indexing—ranking#pagerank