Web Pro News have reported on an Efficient Frontier study undertaken between Q4 2006 and Q4 2007 into the performance of search advertising on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Key findings show that Google took 97% of all ad spend increases between the two periods

Thanks to increased competition and a change to the AdWords algorithm in August, top positions have become costlier in terms of CPC bid prices. In fact, Google led the other two search engines in CPC inflation last year as CPC prices spiked 22%, half of which occurred in Q4 following the AdWords algorithm update.

The AdWords algorithm update did not appear to have an effect on click-through-rates, which remained steady in 2007 until a 12.5% increase in CTR in Q4 2007. Google penalising sites with poor landing pages is thought to be a direct factor in the increased CTRs.

Both Yahoo’s and MSN search advertising is flagging. Whilst both saw improvements in ROI with MSN leading on both Google and Yahoo in terms of CTR and ROI, neither performed well in terms of overall results due to much lower search volumes.

You can read the full article at Web Pro News.

Online Advertising

The team at FathomSEO has noted that the option to check inbound links through MSN has now been enabled again. MSN removed the option to check on inbound links using the method of link: used by Google and Yahoo a while ago.

They have noted that a variety of different operators can be used to query inbound links, all providing different results. They have experimented with the standard Google and Yahoo format of link:www.site.com but found this does not work, but that the following options do:

link:http://www.site.com
link-http://www.site.com
(link:http://www.site.com)
(link-http://www.site.com)

link site (using only the word link and your domain name without the “www” or TLD)

In addition MSN have enabled the OR operator for link: queries allow the following formats to be used:

link www.site.com OR www.site.com
link site OR site
(link site OR site)

Now analysing the inbound linking to your site is possible again through MSN thanks to the team at FathomSEO.

Search Engine Optimisation

Tech Crunch recently posted an article highlighting that in July of last year, Google filed a patent application on image and video search technology. However it was only recently that it made the news public that it plans to patent technology that will allow its search bots to understand specific text featured in images and video clips.

This has the potential of massively changing the search landscape, especially for websites that have a lot of photos or links to video content. Google’s new image search technology would mean that photographs and videos indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within them and presents a huge step forward in the indexing sites that have not previously been available for search.

Digital images often do include text, but were previously unavailable for search since it was impossible to index using older search technology. Image text (text inside an image) typically includes text of varying size, orientation, color and typeface.

For example, text in a digital image derived from an urban scene often provides information about the displayed landscape or specific location. A typical street scene would include text as part of street signs, building names, physical address numbers, window signs and a lot more.

This technology could probably make every book in the Google Books database really searchable, with the next step being YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web and more.

It will be interesting to see how Google develops this new image search technology.

Search Engine Optimisation