Google has just started testing ads in the Image Search, but this was an expected movement, because the image search is very expensive to upkeep, for sure. Currently, it must be in a beta phase, because the ads rarely appear and I don’t see a menu in my Adwords that allows me to place that ads.

I’m sure affiliate marketers can’t wait to try them, even if the image ads conversion is lower than the text ads. Though, the advantage is that the ad also includes text, below an image. Fortunately, the image has an yellow background and above it is the text “sponsored image” so the users won’t click them by mistake. But I’m not that sure they won’t, especially they didn’t expect them to be there.

Once launched, we shall see the advertisers experiences on conversions, but I’m confident they won’t be combarable with the text ads in search.

Take a look at the ads

Two ex Google engineers, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, along with a third person, Russel Power, have released a new search engine. Cuil started with 120 billion indexed pages and they stated that their new search engine has the biggest index of them all. Probably they haven’t read Google’s last post, where they say to have indexed more than 1 trillion pages, which is almost 8 times more than that.
From the tests I was able to make until it got down, it doesn’t seem very relevant and there are a lot of searches it returns no results, while other search engines do.
Cuil is a wannabe semantic search engine, understanding the meaning of words, but it’s not very good at it. Until now, I didn’t find anything I could like at it, better than Google. What I am satisfied of is the simple design.

A simple SEO guideline says that you should end your urls in .htm, .html or make them as mine. Some do not follow this and end them in .php, .asp and other programming languages. It might not be as good as the ones ended in .html, but Matt Cutts say they are and there’s no problem.

Yet he stated clearly that URLs ended in .exe or .0 were not indexed at all until a few days ago. Now it seems Google does index them but we can’t be sure it gives them full trust and doesn’t penalize them.

SEOmoz has faced this problem with their Web 2.0 Awards, that had the url “http://www.seomoz.org/web.2.0″, which finished in .0 .

So take care how you format your URL to be search engine friendly and don’t get penalized.

Have you ever faced an issue with an improper formatted URL not to be indexed by Google ?

Google has just added a new feature to the Trends tool. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what a lot of us were expecting: the search volume in numbers.

Now it shows how much a keyword is searched, in comparison to the average searches since 2004 until the time you perform the query. For example if today the keyword ‘iPhone’ has been searched two times more than the average times it was searched daily from 2004, Google Trends will show ‘2′.

Along with this, now you also have the possibility to download the trends as a CSV file. All you need is to be logged into your Google account.

via Google Blog