PPC Yahoo Google Test

I read this in the Washington Post this morning; that Yahoo, in a three week test, will be showing Google AdWords ads in about 3% of their searches. This is big news, but is it good news or bad news?

I have to say I think that it is bad news. Google owns such as large portion of the search engine marketing market that to expand their holdings onto Yahoo, which really had a good new program, means to the average business that you will simply pay more per click.

Competition is good in a marketplace; offers alternatives, typically keeps prices lower, and keep competitors sharper as they work to garner market support. Moving AdWords onto the Yahoo platform can only mean that you as an advertiser will now pay more money for Yahoo clicks.

Yahoo had an excellent pay per click product and different search demographics which gave advertisers real differences and an alternative to AdWords. Now, when you advertise on Yahoo, you get Yahoo AdWords! I do say this tongue in cheek now, because remember this is a limited test, and it is not a done deal, but it does not bode well for people who are currently advertising on Yahoo.

What it does appear to me however is that with Yahoo and Google cozying up, a merger there may be in order creating GoogleY! Wouldn't that just smack Microsoft in the face? First Microsoft bids too low to move their advertising onto AOL - which really killed their fledgling pay per click program several years ago and now they are letting Yahoo slip through their fingers. A better plan would be to up the ante for Yahoo and then become a real contender to Google searches and advertising.

Check to See If Someone Has Snatched Your Blog Content

A blog reader at my other blog Web-World Watch, left this link http://www.copyscape.com/ on a post that spoke about Google dinging sites for showing duplicate content.

I entered my own blog address in this tool, and found that there were sites that had actually snatched my own blog content verbatim and had not supplied a link back or even had identified me as the author. In fact they had passed the content off as their own, and had selected some of my hottest traffic posts!

I have notified them of copyright infringement! You should check your own content to see if you have a similar problem. If you are like me, you don't mind if others quote you, even show one or two paragraphs of your post and link back to read the full content, or even contact you for approval, but to simply snatch content and provide no links back and pass the content off as their own intellectual property? Very bad form!

The issue on duplicate content that Google is particularly targeting in one of their most recent patent disclosures is simply this case in point. Who should get the credit for duplicate content? Google is developing a way to identify the author of content just in a case like this. I would imagine that this will revolve around the initial post date recorded by the web server and a factor of a match to other content and writing style on the site. Eventually I am looking to the development of a trust certification for site owner to embed on their page that tags their content for Google.

In the meantime, if you are scraping someone else's content from their blog, please stop! It's time to create your own, and if you aren't then check to see if someone is at Copyscape.com.