Searchyogi

I know its in beta, still……

The first time I installed the Wordpress app on my profile, it was WYSINWYG. The list of posts that I saw on my blog was different from what showed up on my Linkedin profile. My latest posts were not showing up. Instead, a post I had deleted showed up! I therefore did a reinstall of the app and this time tagged some of my blog posts with “Linkedin”. According to the options in the app, Linkedin is supposed to pick up all these tagged posts and show it in my profile. No luck! What I saw instead in my profile is a big block of blank space where the blog posts are supposed to show up! Not a good user experience for someone looking at my profile. So for now, I have removed the app from my profile and will try again a few days later.  Hopefully these bugs will be resolved by then.

Google has announced changes to its ad scoring algorithm. The changes are two fold:

Until now, the algo assigned a higher rating to ads that have higher Click Through Rate (CTR), independent of ad position. This decoupling meant that higher position ads got higher ratings, since they were more “visible” to users and hence got higher CTRs. Google is taking care of this anomaly by coupling these two parameters.

The other change relates to giving a much higher emphasis to the quality score at the expense of Ad rank for ads that sit above the organic search results (NOT on the right hand column). For keyword targeted search ads:

Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

Google now will promote high quality score ads to the area above the organic results even though they have a lower Ad rank i.e. their CPC is not as high as the others.

These changes will have an impact on user experience, and possibly a consequent positive effect on the monetization. Kudos to Google for keeping user experience high on their list.

Linkedin today announced that they are allowing users to add applications to their profiles. This is a move a-la facebook and Orkut. I would expect a significant increase in traffic (Page views) for Linkedin with users now logging in to see the new blog post or slide presentations of their friends. Linkedin has the following integrations in place now:

• Blogs: Wordpress and SixApart.
• Box.net for sharing files
• Tripit to see where the people in your network are travelling.
• Google docs and slideshare integration for embedding, sharing and commenting on slide presentations.

I am sure this will aid their monetization efforts significantly. Excellent move Linkedin!