There had been some workshops and guest speakers at last weeks UK affiliate event in Newcastle.
SEO expert Martin Murray spoke for about an hour. To me it was all too basic information but still not boring as he appeared to be a good speaker.
Neil Halpin from Yahoo contributed the most interesting but yet most controversial information on that afternoon. He introduced ‘Search Submit Pro’, a way of influencing your organic rankings - with money involved. Quite a sensitive subject which resulted in many questions of the audience.
Anyway, in case you’re interested in any of these presentations you can download them from a4uevents.com now.

This time I can’t provide any pictures from the event. During my one week trip I took the camera out only once. For this lovely English breakfast (the days after I ordered ‘Continental breakfast’):

Fyi: Brad Geddes from ewhisper.net is devoting a whole week of blog posts to the biggest AdWords mystery: Quality Score in all its aspects. Quite interesting.

I’m still having issues with my websites’ search engine results. Back in January it seemed like I got penalised for something (whatever that may be). In February however I received a quite good amount of traffic from Google.
Now let’s take a look at the following stats from the beginning of March until now:

This is the fourth crash within about three weeks now. Then also my confidence in the whole site is up one minute, down the next. Now I’m waiting for getting back on track. Looking at the stats history it tells me everything should be fine by tomorrow.
Well, despite everything it motivates me to work harder on the backlink subject in hope for a more steady behaviour in the Google SERPs.

I just signed up for the upcoming a4u event in Newcastle. I’m really excited about it as this is probably biggest event of this kind. This time it’s taking place on board the DFDS Seaways m.s Queen Of Scandinavia. There will be workshops, free entertainment and - of course - networking. In the evening the ferry is going to leave Newcastle for Amsterdam. I’m planning on going to the UK a few days before the event and stay another few days in Amsterdam afterwards.
The only thing that troubles me a bit is the quite small number of delegates (72 so far). Of course the whole event will be cancelled if there are not enough attendees. I hope for the best and look forward to it.

Several updates have been made within the past few days.

Adjustments to the quality score algorithm:

Transparency: advertisers are now able to see their keywords minimum bids as well as a rough evaluation of the quality score (such as high, low and mediocre) in a separate column. You can select this column by clicking ‘Customize Columns’ in one of your ad groups.

Quality: As long as Google wasn’t able to collect data on the quality of a landing page the advertiser is benefited with a lower minimum bid. Also the algorithm in general has been improved.

I’m not too happy about the quality part as - again - my websites seem to be suffering from a low quality score for a lot of the keywords. So far all the quality score updates had only affected me temporarily. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Pause Keywords and ad creatives

As of yesterday advertisers can pause keywords and ad creatives. Before you could only delete them which used to be a bit annoying.