There were rumors (Google CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted about it saying “hell had frozen over”) that Google would air its first ever major TV commercial during the Super Bowl. So while watching the Super Bowl yesterday, I eagerly waited to see if all of the tweets and rumors were true – and sure enough Google aired a touching commercial called ‘Parisian Love’. Google explained on their blog that the commercial had been up on YouTube for a few months and already had 1.2 million views. They had such positive reaction that they wanted to share it with a larger audience.

Take a look at ‘Parisian Love’ below:

Google Webmaster Tools created a quiz based on the most commonly asked questions they receive. The quiz will be available until January 27 at 9pm EST.

By taking this quiz and comparing your answers with the answers they will publish at a later date, you should be able to gauge your understanding of Google Webmaster Tools and some SEO basics.

Go take the quiz and remember to print your answers so you can compare them to the real answers when they publish them.

SOURCE: Google Webmaster Tools blog

It seems like everyone has been talking about the Google vs. China scandal, so why can’t I? As almost everyone knows, Google and China have had problems in the past but a situation that occurred a few days ago was the last straw for Google.

The search engine giant discovered that hackers were attempting to access the Gmail addresses of several key Chinese human rights activists. Google has speculated that the attack was coordinated by the Chinese government itself, a claim that the Chinese have quickly denied. Google wasn’t the only business attacked; at least 20 other American companies were targeted as well. China insists that their censorship on the Internet is in the best interests of their people, but can anyone truly agree with that? Google has announced that it has decided to stop censoring its search results in China, but no action has been taken yet.

Is Google overstepping its boundaries in China?

To help you decide, here are some facts about Google and Chinese censorship from the Wall Street Journal.

It looks like the Google Local Business Center has added a nifty little feature to their dashboard. The box is labeled “Post to Your Place Page” and it is almost like “sticky note” that goes on your local business listing detail page.

This feature is almost like a status update that a business can post to their listings page similar to updating Facebook or Twitter. The listing expires after 30 days but can be refreshed more frequently than that. The business owner is limited to 160 characters for this message as well.

It will be interesting to see how/if businesses will start to use this feature and if it has any effect on the local business listing’s ranking. Any creative ideas on how you’ll use this feature?

A little more than a week ago, Google announced they were sending letters with decals to 100,000 of the most searched local businesses in the U.S. on Google.com and Google Maps. Yesterday we received our letter:

The Karcher Group is a Google Favorite Place

We’re honored to be named one of the “Favorite Places on Google.” But really, why does this even matter? The answer is Google Mobile searches.

Google’s Matt Cutts is predicting a huge increase in mobile searches over the next few years. With nearly 3 billion phones in the world, there is a lot of potential. Favorite Places on Google is looking to revolutionize the way we research businesses. You can take a picture of the QR code (bar code) located on businesses. You can then read reviews, see the other sites mentioning them, view menus, and more right from your phone. With these Favorite Places on Google, one can research a business they’ve never heard about right from their phone.

You’ll even be able to pull up coupons and deals from the QR code. You won’t have to print out coupons anymore. You can pull them up on your phone. Business owners will be able to see how many people found their mobile coupons and received directions to their store. Videos and other user generated content will be viewable on your mobile phone as well.

Overall, this is pretty exciting for us. Thanks for searching for us and making us a Favorite Place on Google!

Last month Corey wrote about how Website Page Load Speed will become increasingly important to Google down the road. Since Corey wrote about that, Google has had several important announcements that further highlight this:

Google Analytics Launches Asynchronous Tracking
Google Analytics released a new tracking code for their Analytics code. In the past, the Google Analytics code was placed at the end of the file before the </body> closing tag. The reason the old Google Analytics code was placed at the bottom of the page was to allow the content to load first. The new Asynchronous Tracking code is now meant to be placed at the top of the page before the </head> closing tag. This new code allows the Google Analytics tracking code to “load faster due to improvements in browser execution.”

Google Launches Page Speed Data & Recommendations in Webmaster Tools
Google also released a new tool in Webmaster Tools. This new Site Performance tool displays your sites speed information and also, in an attempt to make the web faster, gives you recommendations to speed your site up. Google says it best: “On Site Performance, you’ll find how fast your pages load, how they’ve fared over time, how your site’s load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency.”

Google Introduces Public DNS
To top it all off, Google has introduced public DNS. The most basic explanation of DNS is it serves as a 411 directory for the Internet. Everyone in the IT world is familiar with 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3. Those are DNS servers offered by Level3 and have been available for years and owned by different companies, all the while being open to the public. Traditionally, your Internet service provider (ISP) provides DNS.

Google has released their own version of free DNS. Their new public DNS is located 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. The new public DNS offered by Google promises to “speed up your browsing experience, improve security, and give you results you expect with absolutely no redirection.”

As you can see, Google is making a push to speed up the Internet. The speed of your website is going to start playing a role in how well you rank (or tank) in Google. Google is pushing to make web developers write code more efficiently and ultimately, making the Internet a better place.

Read more about Google’s let’s make the web faster campaign.

The search engines are always looking to make more money. Google has had a lot of success with their Adwords platform and they keep making changes to it to try and test new things. One of their newer announcements is for their product listing ads. Typically with their PPC advertisements you just get the blue text ads. These new product listing ads are going to have pictures along with price information. There are some images in Google’s announcement but I actually saw these myself while doing some research and decided to share them.

Search for “water filter”

Search for “water filtration system”

The pricing model Google will use on these ads is also new. Currently you pay per click on their ads but these new ads will be on a cost-per-action basis, meaning the product has to sell to get charged for the ad.

From Google:

Product Listing Ads is part of our effort to simplify the advertising process for merchants with large product inventories. Some of the key features of Product Listing Ads include:

* Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.

* List your entire inventory: Product Listing Ads requires no keywords or additional ad text. Whenever a user enters a search query relevant to an item in your Google Merchant Center account, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name. Product Listing Ads makes it easy for you to promote your entire product inventory on Google.com.

Last week I got to attend Pubcon in Vegas. It was a really great conference with a lot of awesome speakers. On Thursday they had a session with Matt Cutts from Google and Sean Suchter from Bing.

During the session Matt expressed that the load time or speed of a page could be increasingly more important in Google down the road. He explained it as a “quality sign” or “trust sign” of sorts. It is pretty obvious information and has had an impact on the crawl-ability of a site. Just think of your own experiences, do you trust a site that runs smooth and is easy to navigate over a slow loading site that times out?

Matt gives some resources for webmasters, site owners, and developers to use and there is a video interview from WebProNews below.

• Google’s Code for Speed
• Firefox Plugin to test page speed
• Web Page Test

Last year Google announced that they would be able to index Flash, but nothing really came of it. Flash, in my opinion, is problematic from a search perspective. Google is now announcing that they have added external resource loading to their Flash capabilities. If the Flash content pulls information in from an external file like an XML, HTML, or text file, Google will be able to index that content and make the relationship between it and the original Flash file.

Here are the capabilities Google says it has for indexing Flash:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

Google has different search engines for different countries across the world. One of their search engines, Google Japan, was caught buying links! For awhile now, Google has been trying to tell people that buying links is bad (not saying it isn’t) but then they do it themselves through paid reviews.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land asks:

How are ordinary web sites to be expected to know the “rules” about what they can or cannot do?

He brings up a great point. Being in the SEO industry, it is easy to overlook the fact that regular website owners may not have a clue that Google even has rules to follow. They could consider buying a link just part of online advertising, something that just can be done on the internet. Its almost like they picked up the phone and put their ad in the yellow pages. I just have to laugh when I see something like this.

Want to read more?

Marketing Pilgrim
Search Engine Land