All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Google Adsense & Images Clarified

Advertising, Internet, Search

The Google Adsense team have clarified the use of images near Google Adsense advertising.

For those that can’t be bothered clicking through and want a quick run down:

Can you display little images beside the Google Adsense ad units?
No, you cannot display little images beside the Google Adsense ad units. Doing so implies a relationship between the images and the advertising, which there isn’t.
Can you display images beside the Google Adsense advertising?
Yes, you can display images beside the Google Adsense ad units, so long as it is clear that there is no association between the image(s) and the advertising.
Can I display images on the same page as Google Adsense advertising?
Yes, of course you can but you must take the above two points into consideration first.
Can you add in some white space or a separating bar between the images and the advertising?
No, adding in white space or a separator would still appear as though there was a relationship between the images and the advertising.

I first noticed people placing images beside the Google Adsense advertising a couple of months ago. As soon as I noticed it, I knew that it wouldn’t be within the acceptable usage policy for Google Adsense. Unfortunately, at the time the policy didn’t explicitly disallow doing such a thing. So, while it wasn’t expressly forbidden, publishers took advantage of the loop hole and I’m sure enjoyed far higher click through rates than they would have otherwise seen.

Ho Ho Ho Holidays

Family, Life

Christmas is upon us once more and its time to kick back and enjoy the festivities. Friday 22nd December was the last work day for me and I have off until Monday 8th of January! It has been quite some time since I’ve had any substantial back to back time off, so I’m really going to enjoy not doing any work related work.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all; enjoy the time off with your families and friends.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Launches Sponsored Results

Advertising, Internet, Search, Websites

Yahoo! have been in the search engine and search marketing game for a long time. Recently, Yahoo! Search Marketing increased their offering to match those of Google by allowing sponsored search results.

Using Yahoo! Search Marketing, you’re now able to have your advertisements listed along side the normal Yahoo! search results. In a similar fashion to that of Google, you have two general positions where your advertisements can be placed:

  • Directly above to search results in a wide banner style
  • On the right hand side of the search results, stacked in a tall skyscraper shape

Yahoo! have also included one more advertising position:

  • Directly below the search results in a wide banner style

Its interesting that Yahoo! have included the advertising space below the main results. Typically, the lower section of a web site is under developed. There is significant amounts of research which describes the benefits you can receive by optimising the lower section of your web site. If the price of that advertising space is right, I think it might turn out to be a fantastic value proposition for advertisers.

Without signing up for Yahoo! Search Marketing, it seems reasonable that you’ll be paying more for the advertising space directly above the search results; as they are more visually prominent and look similar to natural search listings. Second will probably be the sponsored search results on the right and the cheapest will probably be the advertising at the bottom.

There are a couple of things I don’t like about Yahoo! search results:

  • There sponsored advertising isn’t always clearly marked. As an example, the right hand side advertising is quite clearly marked, however the above and below is not.
  • Yahoo! seem to always present a lot of other stuff in search results. For example, you are likely to see alternative search suggestions, the top advertising block, some Yahoo! shortcut links and finally the actual natural search results.
  • As a derivative of point #2, the search results page feels cluttered and busy

To the defense of Yahoo!, they do place little icons beside each block in an attempt to separate them. For a savvy internet user, they will probably notice and associate the icons and realise there is something different about those results. Unfortunately, I expect that an average user probably won’t; at which point they are clicking on advertising without knowing it.

Mezzoblue Redesigned

Websites

After two and a half years, Dave Shea has redesigned Mezzoblue and launched his site back into the lime light.

A few quick points of interest of the redesign:

  • Its sporting a 1024px based design, up from the more traditional 800px design
  • The familiar blue colour of Mezzoblue is gone
  • Posts are organised into collections, where a collection is just a bunch of posts revolving around some arbitrary period of time.
  • The designs colours are adaptive and change based on a photo which represents the time period. As an example, Dave has assigned a photo of the Madrid Airport to the time period between 1 July and 30 September. All posts during that time period will carry that photo as their imagery and the theme of the site will reflect the colours within the photo.

I really like the new design, its good to see that Dave has changed it up. The familiar blue which has adorned Mezzoblue for so long was nice but it was about time to move onto something a little different to freshen it up. The navigation around the site is simple and the typeface is easy to read. I would personally prefer a slightly larger sized font but the size that it currently uses certainly achieves a particular look and feel.

Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft Collaborate For The Greater Good

Internet, Search, Websites

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have collaborated for the greater good and are all going to support a standardised XML sitemap protocol.

Google was the first to implement the XML sitemaps in June 2005 as a beta product. After a few months of public testing, the beta tag was removed and the service was ready for general consumption. Since that time, Google Sitemaps gained a significant amount of momentum.

Its wonderful to see that Yahoo! and Microsoft didn’t implement another format specific to their own search engines and have collaborated with Google. With the standardised XML format, its now possible for content publishers to feed Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft search engines off the same physical file. That point alone is a huge bonus for the publishing community though I think even more significant is that the standardised format will have the same semantic meaning to all search engines as well.