Cameron Gibbs

Update: Danny Sullivan also disputes Scoble’s predictions. Thanks Danny.

If you happen to see Robert Scoble’s video on the death of Google, consider yourself fortunate. I somehow got through 1 and half of the 3 part presentation and I just couldn’t listen to it any longer.

I don’t like to bash on anyone and it’s not really worth my time to do so. However, sometimes people just need to know when someone is giving them bogus information, especially if its coming from someone who is considered an “authority” on the topic.

Well, fortunately for you, Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz wrote an incredibly long post about how Scoble has it all wrong and just isn’t making sense.

By the way, if you’re reading this Scoble, if you’re going to use a whiteboard, it might be a good idea to make it so viewers can read what you are writing. One more word of advice (not necessarily relating to this video): I have a hard time respecting your opinion when you keep talking about yourself when you do presentations.

So I just logged into my adwords account and got a notification that Google will be changing the way the CPC formula works for ad placements for ads that display above the organic results. Straight from Google:

In the current top ad placement formula, we consider your Quality Score and your actual CPC, which is determined in part by the bids of advertisers below you. Even if you have a high quality ad, if advertisers below you are not bidding very much, your actual CPC may not be high enough to qualify your ad to appear in a top position.

With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, we’ll consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.

Your actual CPC will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price for top spots. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay. And you will never be charged more than your maximum CPC bid.

So, even if you’re ranking number one on a keyword, if your bid isn’t high enough, your ad will only show up to the right. I like how I can now have control for it showing up above the organic listings but I don’t like how I have to bid more, even if my ad is the most relevant. I wonder how Google will determine the minimum bid to be placed at the top of the results.

By the way, Google says it will be going into affect in the coming weeks. I wonder how this news will be received and how it will affect my campaigns. This will be interesting.

So YSM called me a couple of weeks ago and offered to suggest new keywords and ads for a client’s YSM account. I’m all for expanding keywords or doing whatever to increase search engine traffic to client’s sites (as long as it has a positive ROI, of course) so I didn’t have a problem with trying it out. The rep assured me that I could view the keywords and ads before they went live so there was nothing to worry about. I was all for them doing free work for me.

So last Friday I got a call and the rep asked me if I had looked at the keywords and ads and if I approved of them. They weren’t showing up in the account so the rep told me she would look into it and call me back. OK, no big deal.

Later that night I noticed that YSM charged the credit card on file to replenish the balance. Again, no big deal… or so I thought. Saturday morning at 2:12 AM I get another email from YSM saying they’ve charged the credit card again, just hours after the previous notification. I had noticed previously that sales weren’t up so I logged into our YSM account and sure enough, those keywords that I was supposed to approve of were live and had generated over a thousand clicks costing nearly a thousand dollars resulting in one conversion. Not cool Yahoo. “Broad” isn’t even the word I would use to describe the type of keywords they were bidding on… more like “irrelevant” and “high-volume.” Needless to say, I immediately paused the campaign.

So today I got a call from the same rep asking if I had a chance to look over the keywords. I related to her what happened and she wasn’t completely understanding. She started to confirm what it was that I had “requested” and she said she was going to look into it. Excuse me? What I requested? You called me and offered me this deal to me!

Stay tuned for an update. If a refund isn’t issued, they better be prepared for the consequences.