Yesterday, Google announced that they are testing new ad formats that among other things will include video. This is how they explained:

Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we’ve blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com.

While I have seen many Google video ads on different websites and blog I have yet to see one of these ads in the search results. But according to Official Google Blog US residents have seen these ads:

AdWords advertisers had an option to create video ad for quiet some times. It would be however difficult for real estate agents to benefit from these video ads in the search results because the longest ad that you can create for your AdWords campaign cannot exceed 120 seconds. Hardly enough time to make a quick video tour of your listing! I am sure however that many creative and innovative real estate agents can use these video ads to promote their real estate business.

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

***You may also want to know that the Law Firm of Daniel Bakondi, in San Francisco, CA, is investigating a possible Class Action Law Suit Against LeapFish.

Update Nov. 9, 2009: It appears that LeapFish is no longer using framesets on their website.

A mention by US Today, stream of hundreds of Tweets , mentioned by hundreds of blogs, a “cutting edge” video on youtube- LeapFish.com relaunch can certainly be seen as enormous success, except…

The leading technology blogs continue to give LeapFish.com nothing short of a “cold shoulder”.

All the buzz surrounding the relaunch is focused on how sexy and nice looking the new website is, no one seems to be trying to “flip beyond the cover page”.

I would like to write about LeapFish’s implementation of framesets on their pages that may actually spook an unseasoned Internet user into believing that they are visiting unsecured websites.

If you search LeapFish for “Read Write Web” for example, the website returns nice clean results with the most relevant link in number one position:

Considering the average user expectation, most of us would expect to land on http://www.readwriteweb.com/ – it is however not the case with LeapFish. After clicking the the link you end up on a nice lookng LeapFish page which embeds (via frameset) the content from The Read Write Web and the LeapFish bar at the bottom of the page:

While visitors to The Read Write Web may not care at all. Visitors to websites like Amazon can get confused and and may be led to believe that shopping on Amazon and other websites are no longer secure. Let me show you an example of what I mean. The following shot is of my Amazon account page while accessing the website directly (typing http://www.amazon.com into my browser):

The HTTPS as well as the lock icon are the basic signs by which an average internet can identify whether or not website is secure.

Now the screenshot of the same page but via frameset on LeapFish.com:

Both HTTPS and lock icons are missing. And the URL clearly says you are still on LeapFish.com. Even though I consider myself an above average Internet user, before I logged into my Amazon account via the frameset on LeapFish I had to check the code of the page first:

I wanted to know if my Amazon login info is safe with LeapFish. How many users do you think will do that?

Potential Issues With Google?

AdSense users can tell you how tough Google is when it comes to enforcing terms and condition and how easy it is to get banned. Google Search API TOS do not address the use framesets- so if you know if use of framesets allowed please enlighten me:

If you are interested to find out more about LeapFish I highly recommend LeapFish Review by Better Business Bureau.

A while back I wrote an article pointing out one of the features available to webmasters at Google Webmaster Central – ability to set a custom crawl rate. At the time I thought it was an outstanding idea. It is still is a good solution should googlebot visit your site too often causing issues with bandwidth (even though I have never heard of such scenario).

Webmasters however should exercise caution when increasing the crawl rate via Google Webmaster Central. A few weeks ago I was involved in an upgrade of a website with 2000+ pages. One of the side effects of the upgrade was that we ended up with 2000+ new urls. Unfortunately there was no easy way to implement 2000+ redirects on the website. But, since most of the traffic came from PPC campaigns, we decided to let Google re-index the website on it’s own. Exception was of course that we used Google Webmaster Central to implement request for a more frequent crawl by Google. We increased the crawl rate by some 3000% only to receive the following notice a few days later:

Dear Webmaster,

Google has algorithms that determine how much to crawl each site. Our goal is to crawl as many page from your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, as we can without overwhelming your server’s bandwidth.

For your site, http://www.xxxxx.com/, you have set a very low crawl rate which is preventing us from accessing your great content. We recommend you set the crawl rate option to “Let Google determine my default”, or, if you prefer to maintain a custom setting, increasing the rate.

Thanks,

The Google Web Crawling Team

In fact the Google had not indexed a single URL from the new sitemap. Not even the home page (which is/was the strongest page of the website) was re-indexed. So we followed Google’s instruction and within 24 hours our new pages began to appear in the index.

So if you are thinking of increasing the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Central – exercise caution or you may run the risk of not increasing the the crawl rate enough for Google to do it’s job.

I have always been a huge fan of Google Local Business Center- a free way to drive foot traffic to your business. When you list your business with Google Local Business Center, you business is likely to show up alongside a Google map for certain search terms. Let say you need to find a dentist in Jackson, NJ- all the listings along the map are result of dentist offices taking advantage of Google Local Business center. I have written in the past how a friend of mind noticed increase of visitors to her shop after we listed her business in Google Local Business Center.
I also wanted to see more statistics and reporting inside the Business Center account. My wishes have finally came ture. It appears that Google is now providing some insightful statistics for your business’ local ads and coupons associated with your listing. Just go to your account and you should see a link to your report as shown in the image to your right.

The port shows the graph of impressions and actions associated with your business:

If you are a business owner and are looking to drive “foot traffic” to you store or business location you should definitely look into taking advantage of Google Local Business Ads- it is absolutely free!

When I read the headline this morning for the first time on AdWords Blog, I thought to myself – “This cannot be good!”. Auction means bidding against your competitors, and when the bidding wars will get out of hand, the end user will suffer.

Well, Google found the way around it by keeping the ad quality in the auctions. Watch the video for yourself and let me know what do you think. It makes a lot of sense to me.