Matt Cutts has just leaked the information that Google has done another update. Widely known as the DEWEY update, this is Google’s major step to include Google Books results in the search results.

While we had been noticing the changes in SERPS from the end of March, this is the first “official” announcements from Google. It has caused major furore and the search rankings have been going up and down wildly.

This kind of major changes are expected every time Google does major changes without announcing… You can expect the same thing when Google launches its own version of Wikipedia. Currently, the Wikipedia results are omnipresent – almost the first in every search… but when Google brings out its own products, there always seems to be a major update just around that time…

You can read more as the story unfolds at
Screwy Dewey Update
Webmasterworld Forums

So now that Google Books results are going to show up atleast 2-3 times on the first page, this leaves only 7 to 8 spots for us morons to show up on the first page. Well, like it or not, there’s nothing much we can do… so get up and start testing & tweaking your pages to maintain your ranking and better it!

Lesson Learnt: Never become too complacent – even if you hold the top spot or first page rankings, you never know what’s going to hit you tomorrow. So continue to build those links, and continue to add new content to help you in the long run. If you rely on too much traffic from just 1 search engine, too bad. The only thing is to make your content so good and compelling that people keep coming back to you, pass your link around, and you build the good will that will help you survive the War of the first page.

Cheers,
Vinai
Editor, The SEO Bible

Before I tell you about Perry Marshall’s personal AdWords coaching “Bobsled Run” that begins September 25, I want you to hear from one of the students who finished the last run in April….

James Prout from Holt Michigan says:

“When I came on board and signed up for the Bobsled Run, it was just like you say, “your wife thinks your crazy for spending ‘that kind of money’ on a dream.”

I went into the Bobsled Run with high hopes and expectations because of some of the other testimonies in the previous Runs. They stated 5X increases and so forth. I was pretty skeptical about our business making a 5X increase in so short a time. But, I could live with a 2X increase. I actually said to my Wife, “If we can get a 2X increase in the next few months, then keep growing it from there, you wouldn’t have to go back to work in the Fall.” (background: my wife is a school teacher). Talk about pressure.

Previously, November was our biggest month ever at over $24,000. That was a good month.

However, January topped it at $25,600

Feb: over $30,000

March: $42,000. This was huge and about doubled what we were making before. We did it in only 2 real months of work.

I took a breather these last few weeks. Just this last week my wife gave birth to our third child. A little baby girl. Her older siblings greeted her into the family with love. Through all this, I couldn’t help thinking that because of the Bobsled Run with Perry Marshall, my wife won’t have to work outside the house anymore.”

James Prout
Holt, Michigan

Get the rest of James’ story (and literally a dozen others)

To your success,

Vinai

• No more tabs! Navigate through the new sidebar, which is much easier to access.
• Breadcrumbs in the page title for easier product navigation.
• The left sidebar that expands and contracts to show and hide options based on your current goal.
• Additions to the Sidebar topics: Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

And Webmaster Tools is now available in 20 languages. In addition to US English, UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Polish, Webmaster Tools are now in Turkish and Romanian.

Sign in to see these changes for yourself. For questions or feedback, please post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of Webmaster Help Group.

Cheers,
Vinai

This would be a major update to the Website Optimizer since its launch.

According to Google, “We’ve added the ability to create A/B split experiments. This new feature is designed to make it faster and easier to optimize your website, and improve conversion rates.”

Actually, A/B testing is ideal for testing different page layouts and see what works better than the other.

Once you have finished your testing, you can now “delete” the test, which was not possible earlier. This was the most requested feature on people’s wish list, according to Google.

Secondly, ad agencies handling multiple client account can now access the Website Optimizer directly from My Client Centre.

If you are new to Website Optimezer, there’s an online multimedia presentation that you can see to gain knowledge and get started.

If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can get in touch with a good SEO consultant to help you. Or call us to help you optimize your website and get more out of it.

Cheers,
Vinai, Editor: The SEO Bible

Most of the people I meet are paying $1 to $5 per click for generic keywords. And still the Click-through-Rate (CTR) is extremely low. Getting a response of 0.68 percent is considered very good in the Paid ads category.

To improve your mileage from the Google Adwords Campaigns, we have created a Free Adwords Expander Utility, which creates broad and exact match keywords for you automatically. All you need to do is to copy the output keywords, and then see your CTR increase.

So what’s new with Sponsored Search at Yahoo. Plenty!

The biggest change is that instead of seeing the top 5 bids, you would now see a range of bids -from highest to lowest.

According to Yahoo, “The bid information displayed within your current account will soon change. As advertisers upgrade their accounts, their bids will no longer be reflected in the current system. To ease this transition and help provide you with accurate bidding information, in approximately six to eight weeks you will see two new data points on the Manage Bids page: First, you will see a bid range for prime placement. This bid range will tell you what advertisers are currently bidding for the spots at the very top of the search results page for each keyword (Example: $.75 – $.25).

Second, you’ll see an estimate of your average position for each listing. Each time you enter a new bid this estimate will change, so you’ll be able to tell where your listing is likely to appear for a given bid. Once these two new pieces of information become available, you’ll no longer see the Top 5 Max Bids column displayed in your account.

Please note that there will be no change to the way listings are ranked for the remainder of 2006; they will continue to be ranked by bid as they are today. Early next year, we will change the way ads are ranked, taking ad quality into account, as well as bid. More detailed information will be provided regarding this change before it occurs. ”
With these changes, I guess we are going to lose the granularity of knowing the top 5 bids and adjusting our position.

Now we will have to try with different bid amounts, and see what position we will get. This would make it more time consuming and cumbersome. Yahoo, I am not sure why you did this move – is it to cloak the individual bid amounts, so that people bid more to be placed, and with the confusion going on, you would ultimately squeeze more money out the pockets of holiday advertizers…

Sorry Yahoo, but I am not “for” your new changes. It sucks! I thought having a more transparent model for Pay Per Click advertising was better than Google in some aspects. That’s because Google’s model is not really PPC – they give credence to the CTR based on relevancy, and we pay less if we have a better performing ad. But at Yahoo, we could tweak the bid, and be assured of a certain placement. Now this will create more confusion, and more hit and trial before you are happy with it.

If you need more information – go look it up at the Yahoo upgrade centre.

I will post more information as it becomes available and I test it out. Keep your eyes peeled folks.

Cheers,
Vinai Prakash,
Editor, TheSEObible.com