Released on: October 24, 2007, 7:24 pm

Press Release Author: Tom Skotidas

Industry: Advertising

Press Release Summary: Yahoo! Search Marketing and online marketing agency First Rate have gone into partnership to distribute Yahoo!’s sponsored search listings across First Rate’s online advertising network.

Press Release Body: Yahoo! does ad deal with First Rate

Yahoo! Search Marketing and online marketing agency First Rate have gone into partnership to distribute Yahoo!’s sponsored search listings across First Rate’s online advertising network.

Yahoo! text ads will now be pushed through First-Rate’s The Performance Network in Australian and New Zealand.

It is the first Trans-Tasman partnership between Yahoo! search Marketing and an online ad network such as TPN which has a network of advertisers and website owners.

First Rate has traditionally generated revenue for its publishers’ by filling their website space with banner ads from advertisers. Under this deal TPN publishers can now backfill their unsold website space with sponsored listings through the Yahoo! Search Marketing platform – creating a new revenue stream beyond traditional banner ads.

Sam Stern, head of business development partner solutions, Australia and New Zealand, at Yahoo! Search Marketing, said: “The partnership with First Rate’s TPN Network expands our sponsored listings distribution network in both Australia and New Zealand, and provides us with increased and diversified traffic to benefit the range of businesses that have Yahoo! Search Marketing search advertising campaigns.”

About Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a leading global provider of sponsored search services on the Internet. The company offers a flexible and integrated approach to advertising on Australia’s leading websites including Yahoo!7, ninemsn, News Interactive, Ansearch and Altavista. The unique and measurable service offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing enables Australian advertisers to accurately target and connect with customers searching for products and services online.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is positioned within the Yahoo! Inc brand with its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The Asia Pacific headquarters are in Sydney, Australia. For more information about Yahoo! Search Marketing, visit searchmarketing.yahoo.com.au

About First Rate (www.first-rate.com.au)

First Rate is one of Australia’s and New Zealand’s leading specialists in search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, email marketing, and online advertising. The company has 30 staff across Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland, and is arguably the fastest growing agency of its type in Australasia.

In 2006 First Rate established The Performance Network (TPN) – one of Australia’s and New Zealand’s largest online advertising networks, with hundreds of website publishers and advertisers across both countries. The websites are

www.theperformancenetwork.com.au (Australia) and www.tpn.co.nz (New Zealand).

Web Site: http://www.first-rate.com.au

Contact Details: Jon Ostler

First Rate

Level 3, 4-16 Yurong St

Darlinghurst, NSW 2011

Ph: +61 1300 553 996

Email: submissions@first-rate.com.au

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Certain types of websites are unlikely to be able to achieve high scores for the quality of their landing pages after Google recently announced some AdWords changes. by Helen Leggatt

- Malware sites that knowingly or unknowingly install software on a visitor’s computer.

Other websites that will attract low landing page quality scores include “get rich quick” schemes, comparison shopping, travel aggregators and ebook websites with ad overload. A new FAQ has been posted by the AdWords team.

“If we receive user complaints about ads for the types of websites listed above, the advertisers of those websites may not be allowed to continue running AdWords ads,” read the AdWords blog entry, posted by a member of the “Inside AdWords Crew”.

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We’re well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), mashups (APIs), and much more. Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we’re starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360).

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As expected early last week, Microsoft announced the “New Live Search”. Todd, Oilman, posted live coverage, as did Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land of the Searchification event at Microsoft. Here is what Microsoft explained is new:

• Relevance, relevance, relevance. We’ve quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches. Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results.
• Speed. Pages load much faster than before.
• Streamlined look and feel. We focused on the end-to-end experience from the homepage throughout the site. For example, search results are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing.
• More high-interest content. You asked us for more in Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Local and Video search and we’re happy to deliver it.

In the coming weeks we’ll blog in detail about the improvements that we’ve made. You can also check out the press release that just hit the wire and the fact sheet for more information.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land goes deep on these changes posting screen captures of many of the new features.

So what is the verdict in the various forums? We have two large threads, one at WebmasterWorld and the other at DigitalPoint Forums. The general consensus in the forums is that the search results are no better than they were. Here are select quotes from the forum thread:

If MS thinks their results have been better than Y! since 2006 someone should be ordered to take a drug and alcohol test.

Boy I looked at a few SERP’s and they are terrible, unless you are a guestbook/blog spammer. Maybe I’m in competitve spaces, but all I see are .edu spammed URL’s.

Some of the discussion at DigitalPoint Forums is more positive, because they have seen increases in traffic to their site from Live.com, but not due to perceived relevancy.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

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First Rate becomes New Zealand’s first Google Qualified Company. First Rate is an online marketing agency that provides online strategy, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimisation (SEO), email marketing and performance-based online advertising and tracking services direct to a range of clients across Australasia. First Rate has offices in Auckland and Sydney.

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