Despite recent reports that the FTC is set to approve the deal sans sanctions, Google continues to face opposition from consumer privacy advocates and EU scrutiny of its proposed buyout of DoubleClick. But the acquisition will also give Google ownership of Performics, a rather large SEO company, a fact that is "raising some eyebrows in the industry," according to Scott Buresh It's a conflict of interest question -- since although the search giant has kept a wall between paid and natural search results (with even that under scrutiny, as of late), marketers that choose to use Performics will …

Imagine that someone close to you is diagnosed with a specific form of cancer, and the doctor recommends "radiosurgery" as one of the treatment options. You decide to do some research on the treatment at home, and do a Google search on "radiosurgery" -- and the top-ranked results that come back feature glowing user testimonials, endorsements and reviews riddled with errors. If you're unaware of the fact that these writers (some of whom had never even actually had the treatment) had been compensated to craft these reviews, you might take them at face value -- and end up …

For product rich e-commerce sites, part of the search strategy often involves crafting dozens of targeted content pages that are optimized for dozens more keywords. But while these pages may rake in user traffic, Kevin Gold notes that they are not always as successful at driving conversions. According to Gold, determining the kinds of traffic that specific keywords are driving to the content pages is the first step toward increasing those conversions. Some keywords or search phrases are better suited to information-gathering or product evaluation kinds of traffic than for conversions, so the content on the pages they …

There's no competition between them, but Matt McGhee still does an analysis of the traffic (via RSS subscriptions) to ClickZ's Search Engine Watch and Third Door Media's Search Engine Land -- arguably, the two most authoritative sources of search industry info in the U.S. Roughly a year-and-a-half ago, many search marketers wondered about the fate of Search Engine Watch, as after the departure of Danny Sullivan and other prominent voices, the site seemed to struggle to find its voice. When Sullivan launched Search Engine Land a few months later, McGhee says that the industry wondered if there was room …

Who says you can't pay for inclusion in the organic search listings? With Yahoo's Search Submit Pro (SSP), large direct and brand marketers can pay to have their site crawled and indexed, and then show up in the organic search results. The site is charged on a CPC basis if a user clicks on an SSP-supplied link (as opposed to one that "naturally" appears in the results). It may seem like a very gray area, but Rob Aronson notes that SSP CPCs are often much cheaper than paid search costs, and that the benefits of increased traffic are worth …

A/B split tests can be one of the simplest ways to determine which keywords or ad copy work best with a PPC ad, since it allows Google to show two versions of the same ad to different searchers. Dee Barizo outlines a three-step process for improving a campaign's CTR through performing this kind of test. First, change the way the ad is actually served by changing the Ad Serving setting to "rotate" instead of "optimize." You can change this setting for each campaign separately in the Advanced Options section of your AdWords account. Tweaking this setting ensures that …