SEO Headlines – Google WiFi Balloons

New Feature Puts “Ask” and “Compete” In Same Sentence!
Okay, that was just a touch snarky. Ask.com revealed an update to their already awesome Binoculars tool on Thursday. Starting today, Ask.com will integrate Compete site data into their search tool to help improve users search experience.

Now when users hover over Ask’s Binoculars in their SERP, the preview window that is generated will have a new tab that allows them to view statistical information from Compete. This statistics tab provides a line graph showing how many visitors the site has received over the past few months, their site ranking, plus a link to get even more information directly from Compete.

I’m not sure that I trust the information Compete spits out 100 percent, but I find myself liking the idea of all this. It’s very handy for searchers who have a hard time deciding the trustworthiness of a site simply from its URL, Title and Description. Giving them Compete data at the first point of contact at least gives them a ballpark figure as to its ranking and user numbers, which may be a selling point for high authority sites. Well played.

Google To Launch Giant Wi-Fi Balloons Into Space

So, uh, according to the Wall Street Journal, Google is considering working with a company called Space Data Corp. What do they do? Well, they send hydrogen-filled balloons into outer space to offer up WiFi to places with little Internet. Yup. The balloons rise at 1,000 feet a minute carrying small cellphone towers, hit 65,000 to 100,000 feet in under two hours, and then when they’re no longer useful, they parachute back down to Earth. How responsible of them?

Andy Beal wants to know if April Fools Day has come early this year. Right there with you Andy. It’s only February, right?

AdSense for Video Beta Released

AdSense for Video has finally reached the beta round and is now available to select publishers. In order to be able to play, publishers must live in the United States and serve up at least one million video streams per month. Why the one million qualifier there? TechCrunch thinks it’s to weed out porn sites. Sounds feasible. The ads can be seen on Google partner sites, as well as on YouTube.

The way this whole thing is running is that advertisers will have two ad formats to choose from – video and text. Both appear as text overlays on the bottom of the video screen and rotate every 20 seconds. If a viewer clicks on an ad, the video they’re watching will be paused a new window will open to play the video ad. Text ads will appear as a banner with a regular contextual AdSense ad that’s triggered by the content of the video and the site it’s being displayed on. Once clicked on, viewers will be taken to the advertiser’s Web site. According to Google, the InVideo ads are charged on a CPM basis, while the text ads are charged on a CPC basis. Users should find these ads to be far less intrusive and more contextually relevant than the current pre-roll/post-roll video ad model.

To apply for AdSense for video beta, please visit the AdSense for video page on the Google Video Advertising Solutions site.

Fun Finds

Darren Rowse tells us that blogsavvy.net is up for sale with a Buy It Now price of $10,000. If you’d like to buy it for me, just let me know. Thanks.

DownloadSquad tells us about .htaccess Editor, a free tool that helps you to quickly generate .htaccess files for your site. And it’s simple enough that even I could figure it out!

Ross Dunn makes my day telling me that Ask.com has the highest growth rate in the latest comScore study. Huzzah for Ask!

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.