Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Google Adwords

"Lets be honest here, Google is certainly one of the biggest players as far as search engines go. The results returned by Google are fairly accurate, and while we take them for granted we cannot forget about all the days of work that must have gone into the algorithms that sort the wheat from the chaf. As this must have cost them some serious money, it would have been unfair to expect Google to keep paid advertisers from their site and it was only a matter of time before paid advertising became an option.


Getting the Balance Right

One of the problems associated with adding paid for listings to search results is that you can't simply hide the paid for links into the results of a search term. In the early days of cost per click searches it was often the companies with the deepest pockets that were guaranteed top spot for a term. The only thing such companies had to prove was that the keyword was relevant to the term, if of course the advert had to be reviewed before going live.


Search engines that offer paid for and free listings should really differentiate between the two types of link. I know that whenever I've used a traditional pay per click search engine the top few paid for terms aren't always relevant to what I was looking for, so I like to know before I click on a link if it was paid for or not.


Paid for results are fine, so long as visitors are aware they are paid for. Any pay per click engine that clearly makes the distinction between the two keeps some of its credibility by declaring its interest in a particular link.


Google Adwords Select

I'll admit I wasn't surprised when I heard that Google was offering a new cost per click program (Adwords Select); it was only a matter of time. However, having read through the way the program works, I was pleasantly surprised. Go"