Recent pay per click shake ups

There have been many developments in the PPC space recently. First we learned that Yahoo lowering its bid minimums, then the big ASK.com change, and finally a big Google slap. I have been getting a few emails asking what I thought about these changes so here goes.

Yahoo removes the .10 minimum bid price. I actually don’t like this change. The .10 minimum kept a lot of the bid bottom feeders off of the Yahoo network, which I predict will now be flooded with zip submit and free Ipod offers. Yahoo has said that the calculation of the bid will be variable based on their quality factors which may help a bit, but the long term effect remains to be seen. Oddly enough, the content network will still have the hard .10 minimum.

Yesterday Ask.com announced it was cutting jobs and “realigning” its search engine. Rumor has it this means they are dropping the Teoma platform and gutting the whole system. Even though I didn’t use ASK for searches, I thought the interface was nice, although the index backing it up was lacking. But the big question on my mind was how will this affect their PPC service. I emailed my account rep and he assured me that everything would stay the same, and their paid search isn’t going anywhere. Their exact quote is “The recent changes at Ask.com will not have any affect on the advertising system” Good to know.

Finally, everyone is buzzing about the latest Google slap. I woke up this morning to 3 emails about it, and was pinged all day by account managers and friends. Thankfully, this one totally missed me! I have been hit hard by other Google slaps in the past, but I guess the Google karma was good for me this time around. I have been hearing that even people with heavy content sites (real sites, not landing pages) were hit this time, so as always, no one really knows what is happening behind the scenes at Google. Good luck to everyone trying to recover from this one. Maybe these tips can help.