Yahoo Hopes Women Make New Site Shine

Women's site Yahoo Shine launches today

Yahoo Shine launched as the company reaches for attention from women amid a competitive web environment for the 25-54 female market.

Tom Cruise waving hello greeted the earliest visitors to Yahoo Shine after its debut. The site aims at attracting interest from women in an age bracket where it is likely they have substantial say over the spending in their households.

One can spend time as well as money, and Yahoo wanted to let people know Shine isn't all about the Benjamins. Their announcement on Yahoo's corporate blog touted a desire for Shine not to be seen as aiming for one particular demographic. Still, the appeal to 25-54 agers looks evident.

Yahoo assembled a solid list of contributors from the world of women's publishing to contribute to Shine's categories, including Fashion & Beauty, Entertainment, and Love & Sex. They also invite the site's visitors to blog as well, with the promise of entries possibly making the Shine front page.

The big push from Yahoo in the promotions arena hasn't begun yet, as the Yahoo home page lacked a link to Shine as of press time. A need for the site to stand out could benefit from advice given by John Battelle, who commented about the Yahoo brand in general recently:

If Yahoo's going to spend marketing dollars to gain share, it has to do it in a major, integrated way. Why not partner with major national brand advertisers, partially underwriting their TV advertising with an final few frames that say "Search for {insert brand here} on Yahoo for special offers" or somesuch? Once the effort proves itself out in conversions, this marketing program could well become a major money maker for Yahoo.

Though his point of view concerned making the link between a call to action on TV and the landing page on Yahoo more connected, the promotional aspects could benefit Shine. Yahoo should look at its ad clients, see who may be advertising on shows with a strong female audience (hi Oprah!) and work out some way to get the Yahoo Shine brand in front of a large viewership quickly.

Link Buying Replaced With Bartering

Google Time Warp Edition

Here's a hard truth for the hardliners to swallow: Outlawing something sometimes has worse consequences than the thing outlawed. Or, as the mob tried to tell Congress once: Prohibition's a bitch.

Pardon my French. I'm descended from Appalachian bootleggers.

Google's recent and notorious hard line stance against paid links is resulting in something quite predictable: The disaffected are leveraging every back-alley strategy they can think up. At least it doesn't involve exploding trailers, tripwires, or bullets.

Andy Beard was a bit of a pioneer on the link-laundering front; his (complicated) strategy for masking paid links got some attention last month. But simpler tactics are emerging, some inspired by Google itself.

One of them, which is the digital-world equivalent of impersonating a police officer is destined for a crackdown. Dave Naylor points to (and thus becomes a bit of a narc) what appear to be Google ads but are really nicely done spoofs.

Now that's pretty sneaky.

John Andrews reports another method, which Google would have hard time targeting since the idea came from them to begin with. Instead of buying links, barter for them, which makes for a weird 21st Century currency time warp.

It's so dreamy, oh fantasy free me/ So you can't see me, no not at all/In another dimension…

It's just a jump to the left and then a step to the right to find Google rewarding volunteer participants at the Google blog with juice-filled back links. Andrews gets a little dramatic in his analogies (so do I, for that matter) comparing Google to a casino and SEOs to card-counters before suggesting Google is actively looking to destroy the entire SEO industry.

There is a nugget of reason within this paragraph, though. See if you can find it. (Hint: It's in bold type.)

The take-away is this, folks: Google is controlling you not for some benevolent reason, but in order to control the currency of the web. It took X amount of effort in those forums, dedicated for free by those posters, to earn a direct backlink from Google’s very popular webmaster blog. What was that worth? Google got to decide. Google thinks it is fine to barter in links without the nofollow… it just wants the price for such links to remain pitifully low, managed by Google. Can you see it now? Do we really need to wait a few more years until it is perfectly clear beyond any doubt that Google has all of the money and there is no room for us to share?

… But it's the pelvic thru-ust/ that really drives you insane-yay-yay-yay-yane.

Bob Massa carries on that idea in this extraordinarily long, but perhaps more reasonable, post, which you can read for lots of good industry insight, or you can rely on Aaron Wall to dig out a solid, actionable nugget. In a smaller nutshell, people will barter links in exchange because:

Either it makes them money, saves them time, provides added value to their visitors or they believe it makes them look good or smart or benevolent to their visitors, their peers, their friends, their relatives, to the search engines, award sites or just about anyone that can make them a buck or stroke their ego.

Or, as it's still known by the revenuers in Washington: You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

About the author:
Jason Lee Miller is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.

Google Expands AdWords Exclusion Options

Category exclusion available now for advertisers

A recent update to the AdWords Site Exclusion tool allows advertisers to keep their ads out of broad categories of sites along with excluding individual ones.

The change also brought a new name to the feature. Goodbye Site Exclusion tool, hello Site and Category Exclusion tool.

This revision should make it easier for advertisers to keep their ads out of sites where they feel the incoming clicks fail to convert at a satisfactory rate. The Inside AdWords blog said category exclusion can be used with any type of campaign running on the content network: keyword-targeted or placement-targeted.

Now that they have the feature available, Google really hopes advertisers won't use it heavily. The blog post cited points where the company feels category exclusion will be overkill.

For one, since Google makes content network sites follow AdSense policies, advertisers already have that protection in place. Google also suggested that blocking a category may keep ads from appearing on what would be relevant pages for the campaign.

We don't think too many advertisers will buy these arguments, as category exclusion has been a hotly-requested feature. Advertisers who see category exclusion have too much of an impact on their campaigns will likely back off from it, anyway.

About the author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Follow me on Twitter, and you can reach me via email at dutter @ webpronews dot com.

Google Analytics Unveils Benchmarking Service

Erasing names and trading notes

A new Google Analytics feature may take a few weeks to get rolling. Once it catches on, though, the benchmarking service should give users the ability to compare their properties to other sites within an industry.

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On the Google Analytics Blog, Brett Crosby writes, "Of course, benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their data into the system, so we're also introducing a new data-sharing settings page. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data. To be clear, we are not sharing individual data with competitors; we bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymize and aggregate the data."

So opt in and see the anonymized, aggregated data, or opt out (or do nothing) and don't. Everyone gets to make the choice for him (or her) self.

We're a little concerned that the far-and-away winners in every field won't participate; they're ahead, they know they're ahead, and they don't need to do anything to stay that way. But even a comparison between also-rans would be enlightening, and judging from early responses, it looks like a lot of people will choose to share.

Should you decide to do so, just be patient afterwards। Crosby notes, "Once you opt in, it may take a couple weeks for the reports to populate."

About the author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

Tons of jokes - Exhausted Santa

Banta saw an exhausted Santa running up to him."What happened to you Santa?""There was this nasty big bull in my street that nearly killed me today.""Oh really, what happened?"

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Viacom Checked In Google, YouTube Lawsuit

Viacom might win in its court battle against YouTube and Google

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Yahoo Changes Bylaws To Stall Microsoft

Microsoft will have to wait to nominate new directors for Yahoo's board, in its efforts to takeover the company.A change announced by Yahoo gives them a little more time to try and find an alternative to being acquired by Microsoft. Under Yahoo's bylaws, nominations to the board of directors had to take place by a March 14th deadline.

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AdSense Earnings Down?

There's word around the Webmaster World forum that publishers have been experiencing a sharp decline in AdSense earnings over the past month. There's been little consensus, lots of possible explanations, but nothing you might call conclusive.A small poll at Search Engine Roundtable (43 participants as of this writing) shows just over half reporting a decrease in AdSense earnings, the other half reporting that things are on the level or increasing.It's hard to say that's a representative sample with just 40 respondents, but it does match a bit with the reports at Webmaster World: some are losing, some aren't.Many plausible explanations have been proffered without any real, thorough site examinations, as no URLs have been given by those complaining. The center of conversation though, has been around Google's "smart pricing," and whether that is the cause of lower returns on ad clicks.AdSense Earnings Down?An ad's cost-per-click is determined by a number of factors, according to the AdSense blog's explanation:"More than conversion rate goes into determining the price of an ad: the advertiser's bid, the quality of the ad, the other ads competing for the space, the start or end of an ad campaign, and other advertiser fluctuations."Keep in mind also that Google has the leader in CPC inflation rate, also.Google denies that clickthrough rates affect the price of an ad click, though they don't go into how much weight is put on user action beyond the click, i.e., sales completed, forms filled out, engagement on the site that follows. Google describes smart pricing this way:"Google's smart pricing feature automatically adjusts the cost of a keyword-targeted content click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click. So if our data shows that a click from a content page is less likely to turn into actionable business results -- such as online sales, registrations, phone calls, or newsletter signups -- we reduce the price you pay for that click."But observers are right also to note that the higher quality the site, the higher likelihood the publisher gets high quality, costlier, better-converting ads. AdSense Publisher Support pretty much says so, reminding publishers that content is king:"[Smart pricing] leads to higher payouts for publishers by drawing a larger pool of advertisers and rewarding publishers who create high quality sites…. The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users."This also means driving targeted traffic to your site -- advertisers don't gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR."So, this is Google's usual stance: create some relevance and we'll help create you some revenue.Things like that have added to the cynicism in the aforementioned forum, as one member notes the lack of examples to test, and, without naming names, notes that some complaining members' sites are nothing to write home about with potential quality problems like: * Obviously made for AdSense (which implies lack of content) * Too many ads, including unrelated ads (lack of focus on content, lack of central theme) * Confusing layouts (not end-user focused)Webmasters also reported conversations they had with the Google AdSense team, who told them the sharp decline likely has to do with advertiser budgets, many of which would understandably be tightened after the holiday crunch, and perhaps even more so during economic uncertainty.So recession in the economy might mean recession in your AdSense take-in, too.An interesting frustration was also presented. Google's smart pricing, according to forum members applies account-wide. A webmaster with many sites but one AdSense account could experience a hit on all of his or her sites, instead of just one or two. This brings down the revenue potential of the more popular sites the webmaster owns.The suggestion, then, is that Google adjust so that smart pricing affects individual sites and pages, rather than targeting an entire account.

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