Over the past couple of years, the Click Quality team has launched many new initiatives and shared a great deal of information about how they combat click fraud. To help keep track of their various presentations, blog posts, articles, and more, they've created a new website to serve as the single source for all click fraud and ad traffic quality related information. The new site is called the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center and can be found at http://www.google.com/adtrafficquality.

If you're just starting to learn about click fraud -- what it is and what we're doing about it -- start with the Overview section. If you'd like more information, visit the Resource Center's Help Center for detailed FAQs and multimedia presentations. If, on the other hand, you follow the industry closely, you may want to check out Technical Talk which features in-depth articles and blog posts written by our engineering team and other experts in the field.

Click fraud remains an important issue to online advertisers (you may have noticed that Yahoo! has also launched a similar effort for their advertisers), so we hope you find the new website useful. Much of the information was created based on the questions and concerns heard from our advertisers, so let the team know what you think. The Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center is a work in progress and the team will continue to add information, including videos of events, presentations, and articles, as the content becomes available.

Finally, if you're interested in hearing more about click fraud directly from the experts and are attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, CA, be sure to check out the Search Engines on Click Fraud panel taking place Tuesday, August 21st -- Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Google Trust & Safety, will be speaking.

Source: The official source for information about AdWords

Microsoft Corp. said on Monday its Web search business remains on a "positive trajectory" with plans to roll out several updates over the next 12 months.

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services group, said the company is building on momentum after its Windows Live Search gained market share over competitors in the quarter ended in June.

"Over the next 12 months, we've got a very aggressive engineering plan with multiple releases of search coming forward. So, I think we are on a positive trajectory," Johnson said in an interview.

Microsoft lags far behind Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in Web search, the most lucrative slice of a rapidly growing online advertising market.

Source: reuters.com

In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for webmasters of affected sites -- suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post "About badware warnings" as well as the stopbadware discussion group. Now, Webmaster Tools provides malware reviews.

If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it malware-label-free in our search results:

1. View a sample of the dangerous URLs on your site in Webmaster Tools.
2. Make any necessary changes to your site according to StopBadware.org's Security tips.
3. New: Request a malware review from Google and we'll evaluate your site.
4. New: Check the status of your review.
** If we feel the site is still harmful, we'll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous URLs
** If we've determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the near future (usually within 24 hours).

We encourage all webmasters to become familiar with Stopbadware's malware prevention tips. If you have additional questions, please review our documentation or post to the discussion group. We hope you find this new feature in Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems, and thanks for your diligence for awareness and prevention of malware.

Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

While many search marketers understand that there is a connection between online and offline marketing, some may not understand its full extent. According to a new study by Jupiter Research and search marketing agency iProspect, a surprising two-thirds of searchers are led to search on a given keyword as a result of offline marketing.

Specifically, 37 percent of respondents said that in the last six months, a television ad prompted them to conduct a search on a particular company, service or slogan, while 20 percent said a magazine or newspaper ad led them online. Twenty percent said a company's store drove them online, and 17 percent were influenced to search by a radio ad. A smaller number were influenced by outdoor ads.

Only 33 percent of respondents said they had not been influenced to search by any offline media in the past six months. For daily searchers, the influence of offline media was even more apparent, with only 28 percent of searchers saying they had not been prompted to search by any offline media in the past six months.

"Today, it's incumbent upon marketers to integrate search with their offline efforts," said Robert Murray, iProspect's president. "Quite simply, their offline messaging needs to be memorable and facilitate search, and their search efforts need to echo that messaging and integrate those keywords. The bottom line is that integration is no longer optional."

The most common keywords searched were company names, or names of products or services mentioned in an offline ad. In 44 percent of cases, the keyword was the company name. To take advantage of this, marketers should prominently feature company and product/service names in their offline advertising, and make sure their sites are organically optimized for those keywords, and they are showing up in search ads on those keywords as well.

If an offline ad features a tagline or slogan, search marketers should also ensure they are showing up in either organic or paid results for that as well, Murray said. "Offline ads have a short window of time to get the message out to the audience. People often tune out ads, but remember snippets of them. That makes search even more important," Murray said.

Besides driving traffic, offline media tends to drive quality traffic, according to Murray. The study asked those users influenced by offline media if they had ultimately made a purchase at that site as a result, and found that 39 percent had done so.

That 39 percent conversion rate is generally higher than the rate achieved by either search or offline channels alone, Murray said. While the offline ad gets attention and creates demand, it's search that can harness that demand and drive the potential customer to the company's site and turn it into a sale, he said.

"Sure, offline channels can drive traffic, but at the end of the day, it's pretty much meaningless if a purchase isn't made," said Murray. "Marketers want to know the pay-off. And the data from this study suggests that search and offline produce extremely impressive results."

While many marketers are aware of the relationship between online and offline media, it can still be difficult in some organizations to coordinate online and offline campaigns, due to the siloing still present in many marketing departments, Murray said. Many offline marketers don't want to give up any control to their online counterparts, but Murray has found that laying out the situation clearly can help both sides adopt more of a team attitude.

"Search is no longer an add-on consideration for marketers," said Murray. "It is front and center. And while it is a powerful channel on its own, it's clear that its efficacy is multiplied when combined with offline channels."

Source: clickz.com

ComScore, one of the top Web site traffic measurement firms, has changed its methodology for tracking Web searches and the news is not so good for Yahoo.

Under ComScore's new qSearch 2.0, Yahoo lost market share from a year ago and is now at 23.5 percent for July, while Google gained share, reaching 55.2 percent market share. The other market share loser was AOL.

"Google continues to really grow leaps and bounds above the competitors," James Lamberti, senior vice president at ComScore, said in a panel on Monday at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif.

Ask managed to hold share, Yahoo "was nearly flat in terms of absolute query growth", and Microsoft's search promotion boosted its share, he said. Excluding the bump from compensating people to use Microsoft Live search, Microsoft's share would have dropped, he added.

ComScore made some changes to the way it tracks and measures searches, which benefits Google but puts Yahoo at a disadvantage. Now ComScore counts not just searches from a search engine site, but also from affiliate or partner sites that return results from the search engine. Google has more such search affiliates than Yahoo does.

ComScore also is counting as separate searches clicks on tabs such as "images" and "news" that offer specialized searches from the main Web search site. The news was not all bad for Yahoo. "Yahoo is doing well in terms of paid clicks because of Panama," the company's new search advertising system, Lamberti said. "Even though we see a slight drop in market share we're still growing in number of searches and paid search," said Yahoo spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly. "These are strong indicators of our position in the market."

Brad Goldberg, general manager of search marketing at Microsoft, provided this statement, "We are pleased to see market share and query volume for Live Search continue to grow in July, as all third-party indices are reporting. Notably, the refinements ComScore has instituted with qSearch 2.0 are positive for the industry and advertisers, as its methodology more accurately measures search traffic sources that are core to customer engagement and enables advertisers to get the most out of search."

ComScore also said it was expanding its search reports to include other search share in other countries, as well as to other Web sites that include search, such as eBay, Amazon and MySpace.com. According to Nielsen/NetRatings July search market share figures. Google now has 53.3 percent, Yahoo has 20.1 percent and Microsoft has 13.6 percent.

Source: zdnetasia.com